How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

My children love the inexpensive“ hot and ready” pizza from Little Caesars.  In fact, it is one of the few things my seven-year-old, an increasingly picky eater, will consume without a fuss. Me? I think it tastes like cardboard.  Give me a thin-crust, made from scratch pizza from Bufalina in Austin and I’m content.  Or the deep-dish at Gino’s East in Chicago.  I love that, too. And one time in Denver I had a slice from a food truck that was out of this world…

What is the best pizza?  The crust, the toppings, the temperature for baking?  With how much parmesan and chili flake on top? Surely there is one immutable and correct answer, right? 

Of course not.  And that is a lot like trying to answer how long a blog post should be.

A few words about blog post length

Opinions vary, of course. Some folks believe that shorter posts that get to the point faster are more likely to be read to completion.  Think four or five hundred words.  Some people believe that longer posts flush with detail are more highly valued.  Fourteen or fifteen hundred words to get the job done. For a long time, there was a “general rule” that eight hundred to a thousand words was the optimal length for appealing to search engines and readers alike.

If you have come here to find the exact number of words you should shoot for, you should stop reading and go elsewhere. That answer is not in this post nor found anywhere else on our blog.

Truth is, no one really knows how long a blog post should be, precisely because tastes so widely vary.  The preferences of each reader will vary.  The preferences of search engine crawlers vary. And the preferences of the writer vary. 

Even though there is not a single correct answer, there are some best practices to follow when it comes to determining the ideal length of your blog posts.  Check each of these boxes and your next post will end up the perfect length.

Best practices around blog length

Make sure you finish your thought

One of the best ways to ruin a blog post is to not ever get around to making the point. When writing a post, take great care to actually finish your train of thought. As basic as this advice might seem, a startling number of posts never actually make their point but rather ramble on before abruptly ending with a link to “contact us” or “learn more.” 

Most of these posts are between three and five hundred words, are cram-packed full of keywords, and are intended to appeal to search engine crawlers.  The problem is if these posts actually get indexed and ranked then actual people will end up reading them. One surefire way to turn off visitors to the blog is to provide them content that doesn’t deliver any value. 

Remove the fluff

Conversely, the internet is littered with blog posts that are too long on purpose. Stuffing your post with extra verbiage and ancillary content or points of view is a waste of time.  The most common offender is the blog post that tries to optimize for keywords, peppering in phrases where they don’t really belong just to try and improve organic rankings. Blog post length bloated by such text is causing more harm than good.

Readers are not stupid, generally. No one is going to read your three thousand word blog post and think “every word of that was great” if it wasn’t. They might, however, say “that post would have been better if it wasn’t drowning in itself.” 

There is a difference between quality content and fluff.  If you are writing with the hope of reaching some arbitrary word count and cannot get there without adding extra adverbs and adjectives, take a break and come back later. If you have something useful for the reader to add then you should certainly do so. But don’t ruin a perfectly fine blog post by stuffing it with words that aren’t needed.

(Side note: our business is called Hemingway precisely because we love writing that focuses on not using two words when one will do.)

Use headers

A well-constructed blog post will use headers and sub-headers approximately every three hundred words.  If you have sections that are longer, break them up with headers. If you cannot find a logical breakpoint, you are probably fluffing the post a bit.  And if your sections are significantly shorter than three-hundred words, then the section either needs to be expanded upon or combined with another short section. 

Using headers properly is a great way to give yourself some guardrails to protect against being both too brief or too expansive with your post writing.

Tie the post up with a proper exit

The conclusion of your blog post should not simply be about your call-to-action.  Yes, you may want to offer a clear request of some kind.  (You also shouldn’t feel compelled to do so.  Readers are smart. If they want more information they know what to do).  A well-structured conclusion brings the points you made all together so that the reader can take away the primary theme or intention of the post itself. Bringing all of that together in a couple of sentences should be the primary goal of your conclusion.

If you struggle to wrap up the post with a tidy bow at the end, then it is likely that you have too few or too many words up above. Conclusions should be just about the easiest part of a post to write.

The ideal blog post length is a myth

This post is about the ideal and acceptable blog post length.  The point here is to stop worrying about the number of words and instead follow some simple tactics that will naturally produce the right length. Agonizing over reaching three hundred or eight hundred or fifteen hundred words is the enemy of producing great content that people want to read. 

Instead of worrying about word counts, focus on constructing a post that is coherent, structured, and interesting. The internet is full of garbage blogs precisely because writers were serving interests other than creating content that is useful. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to post.