My friend was telling me a story the other day about the first article he ever wrote for a magazine. He was assigned to write a piece on a local non-profit, this was his big break, so he didn’t want to leave anything out.
He interviewed the founder about why she started the non-profit, and what their goals were. He interviewed the people that had their lives changed by the services of the non-profit. The piece was engaging and emotional. He took all the transcripts, information, and life changing work and wrote what he thought was a home run.
He handed in the piece at a whopping 8,000 words. Then his editor got her hands on it. Saying she cut the fat was an understatement. What she brought back to him was a 1,200-word article, an article that turned out to be exemplary work, it was the best thing he had ever wrote.
When it comes to SEO and blogging for your company, size does matter. Bigger isn’t always better, though, quality will always be the king or queen of the writing jungle. But there is some guidelines and structure you should know and follow.
My how big your blog post is
Listen, you need to put in some work with your writing. Your blog post should at the very least contain 300 words for search engines to correctly index the material. Google is looking for quality content that will make their searchers happy, and they think most 300-word blog posts don’t make the cut.
In general, long posts will rank better in search than shorter ones. The rub here is that not everybody can whip out 1000 word plus articles and have them be readable, let alone be value driven, engaging content.
But that should be the goal, right? We should all be attempting to create unique, compelling content that brings value to our readers. We should work on doing research and writing content that builds relationships, and brings together tribes and communities. It just so happens that when you do all of the above correctly, you end up with great SEO.
Tell me why my oh so big blog post does well in search
So you’ve written that 1000 plus word blog post, and you see it’s doing well! But you have no clue as to why it’s doing well. When you write longer posts, you end giving Google more clues to determine what your text is about. If your post is well written using a strong structure the keywords or topic you are aiming for will be mentioned multiple times throughout the text. You will end up with more headings, links, and pictures, all of which your keywords will be mentioned.
Past your main topic, with longer blog posts you will be able to hit secondary topics, that could rank for multiple long tail keywords. When hitting multiple topics your piece has the chance to turn up in search results for different keywords. All of this results in greater organic search results.
Let’s wrap this up!
Put in a little work, write blog posts longer than 300 words. If you can write engaging content that brings value to your reader’s life that is over 1000 words, do exactly that. With that being said, quality is always what you should be aiming for, and if you find you’ve said everything you need to say in 700 words, please don’t bore us with three extra paragraphs of fluff for no reason.
If you need help writing high-quality content, Boldthink can assist you in that endeavor. Contact us today!
