Long Blog Posts vs. Short Blog Posts: Which Is Better and Why?
Blogs come in all different shapes and sizes—or, in this case, word counts. In a world of mass consumption and competing interests, the length and quality of the blogs you produce become increasingly important to attract new clients and meet your business’s needs.
You may be well established in your business or just starting out, but at one point or another, you have tried to strike a balance between writing long and short blog posts if your marketing strategy involves inbound marketing.
So, what is the perfect article length? Is it better to produce long- or short-form articles as part of your content strategy? In this article, I will be going over the differences between the two and give my opinion on which may be better for your financial firm.
Understanding the Blogging Ecosystem
Repeat after me: Google is our friend. Our very particular friend who likes to see things done in a specific manner. I say this jokingly, but I want to hammer home the importance of ranking highly on search engines like Google. We do this primarily through search engine optimization (SEO), which will help you increase traffic to our website and position your company as your content ranks on Google.
Search engines like Google thrive on providing the best answers to people’s questions and design their ranking criteria to reflect that. Here are a few of the best practices that you can use to help rank your content on Google:
Build topic authority
Increase opportunities for backlink shares
Provide good alt-text on your site
1. Build Topic Authority
Topic authority refers to your company’s expertise over a specific niche or subject. The more authority you demonstrate on a particular topic, the more it indicates to Google that you are a great resource to users (which Google loves!). You do this by providing value on issues your target audience actively seeks answers to.
If you’re not consistently publishing content to demonstrate your authority, Google never has the chance to know that you’re a resource to its users. Hence, it will never show your site in users’ search results, because the users wouldn’t benefit.
2. Increase Opportunities for Backlink Shares
Backlink shares act in a similar way to references or citations. You are essentially linking to other high-authority websites to increase credibility and increase favor on Google’s rankings.
Backlinking is a two-way street. By providing links to users on other sites, you demonstrate that you’re a good resource. Likewise, publishing your own high-quality content provides opportunities for others to link back to your site, increasing your authority.
Backlink shares can be an effective way to help improve your SEO and is a pretty easy strategy to use. For more tips on backlink shares and their effectiveness, check out Backlinko’s awesome study on backlink shares. (See what I did there?)
3. Provide Good Alt-Text
Alt-text helps describe an image in words to help search engines and, most importantly, your readers. To rank on Google, proper alt-text implementation is helpful for Google Images.
You want to make sure your description is short, sweet, and specific. It should also have some additional context relevant to the topic you’re writing about.
Let’s take a stab at some alt-text. If our topic was on working with a financial professional to manage finances and we included the image below, we would want to include alt-text for the image to communicate to Google what the image depicts. Alt-text is another opportunity to incorporate the target keyphrase.
Alt-text example: Financial professional helping their client manage their finances.
Get the point?
While these factors are important, they should not take away from the fact that Google LOVES unique, high-quality content. All these factors play a role in helping your content rank on Google. Individually, one of these factors alone won’t move the needle as much as the content you actually produce.
So, let’s look at the two forms of blog content and assess which is better: short blog posts or long blog posts.
Short Blog Posts
For argument’s sake, let’s say that a short blog post would be deemed anything between 300 to 900 words. Here are some opportunities and challenges to consider:
Opportunities With Short Blog Posts
Nowadays, readers have limited time and attention spans. Short blog posts written consistently over time can help you produce more content at a higher rate and hook readers early. You may be able to provide short bites of information to readers just looking for a quick tip.
You may also want to consider budgeting in this case if you’re outsourcing content. Not everyone has a large enough budget to pay someone else to produce consistent long-form blog posts. When you write many short blog posts, you may be optimizing your available resources.
Challenges With Short Blog Posts
But while short blog posts can help you hook an audience at a much faster rate, the flip side is that you don’t necessarily have the time or space to delve into a topic in depth. At the end of the day, your aim is to provide helpful, quality content to your followers. One of the challenges with short blog posts is that they limit the amount of space you can write about a topic.
Furthermore, short blog posts provide less opportunity for Google to recognize what your content is about, as there’s only so much space to incorporate your target keyphrase. By only publishing short blog posts, you risk Google not recognizing your authority and what your content is really about.
Long Blog Posts
Long blog posts, on the other hand, might consist of anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 words (or longer!) According to blogging experts at Hubspot, the 50 posts that generated the most leads were, on average, 2,569 words long.
Opportunities With Long Blog Posts
Long blog posts offer the reader more detail, which better demonstrates your authority on a subject. Readers are more likely to get what they are looking for out of long blog posts. And if you format long blog posts correctly, you don’t need to worry about scaring away readers who are just looking for quick information. Strategic use of bullet points, numbered lists, and subheaders makes your blog posts easy skimmable for the skimmers out there.
Additionally, Google has a much better chance to understand and potentially rank your content higher to help organic traffic flow. This could be through incorporating more of your long-tail keywords or variants and allowing you to take a deep dive into a subject. Google also recognizes that longer blog posts are likely higher-quality, as they’re offering more in-depth information.
Challenges With Long Blog Posts
A challenge with this form of content is the opposite problem short blog forms have. You want to be careful of just writing for the sake of trying to meet Google’s ranking standards (please, do NOT keyword stuff or fill your content with useless fluff). Your reader ultimately has to have answers to their questions, which generates more eyeballs and $$$ to your business.
Long blog posts are also more time-consuming to write than short blog posts. For busy professionals, writing long blog posts consistently enough to reap the rewards simply isn’t feasible. However, writing long blog posts may mean that you can spend less time on other forms of content marketing. Long blog posts make it easier to repurpose content into short social media posts, email newsletters, and more.
Ok, So Which Is Better: Short Blog Posts or Long Blog Posts?
Generally speaking, the data leans overwhelmingly towards long blog posts as the most effective content form for blogging.
However, while long blog posts may be definitively better than short blog posts in terms of SEO and user experience, that doesn’t mean that you will automatically rank better or even attract the right clients if you have long-form text on your site. You still have to have a good strategy guiding your content production, and you have to be consistent.
So, what can you do to help ensure your strategy is effective moving forward? We recommend taking the following actions to incorporate long blog posts into your content marketing strategy:
Do an audit of your current blog content
Create an effective blogging strategy
Use text length tools
Or, just leave it to me
1. Do an Audit of Your Current Blog Content
Audit your current blog content by asking yourself the following questions:
Am I writing unique content?
Is my current content truly answering the questions my audience is asking?
Is my content detailed enough to provide real value?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, your blogging strategy isn’t likely to be effective. Duplicating or plagiarizing content from others isn’t going to set your site apart. Indeed, duplicate content may punitively affect your SEO. Google doesn’t want to provide its users with duplicate content.
Additionally, your content needs to provide clear and quality-driven answers to the questions your target audience is genuinely asking. If you’re providing answers to the wrong audience or providing answers to questions your audience doesn’t have, your website isn’t going to attract the right leads for your business.
And if you’re just providing surface-level answers to your audience that won’t actually help them solve problems, you might as well not produce any content at all. Your content does need to be detailed enough to provide valuable education or solutions to their problems.
2. Create an Effective Blogging Strategy
The first step to an effective blogging strategy is to have a very clear idea of your ideal audience (which is your ideal client). If you haven’t yet created an ideal client avatar, you need one before you take any other action.
Next, brainstorm a list of questions and problems that your audience is actually asking. Think about the problems you already help your clients solve. Additionally, what keywords or keyphrases might your audience use to find you on Google? Both of these things should help you create a list of content topics that will attract your target audience.
Finally, take a look at what kind of content your competitors are producing. Who is ranking on Google’s first and second pages? They can be used as inspiration if you are both writing about a specific topic. From there, you will want to adjust your strategy based on your findings.
3. Use Text Length Tools
You may not know the appropriate length to use just yet, which is fine. Data from HubSpot suggests that the sweet spot is anywhere between 2,100-2,400 words. You can use that number loosely, as the ideal length can vary depending on several factors.
You may find that writing 1,000-word articles rank much better than your articles that are 2,000 words or more. Plus, 1,000 words isn’t as overwhelming as 2,000, and you typically still have enough room to dive deeper into a topic. To start, you can use tools like Yoast (if you have a WordPress site) to determine if you are close or far off with their text length check tool.
4. Or, Just Leave It to Me
I get it. Taking the time to truly restructure and add valuable content can be time-consuming. You can leave the head-scratching work of copy to a professional like myself, and I can help your business continue to serve your new and existing readers.
Want to chat about your digital marketing needs? Schedule a free 20-minute consultation call with me by emailing hillary@galecreativeagency.com or simply choosing a time on my calendar.