How Long Should a Blog Post Be

I start with the keyword and a quick judgement of search intent. For "how long should a blog post be" the intent is clearly informational and mildly commercial – people want a rule but they also want to avoid wasting time. I then pull the top 5 results from a fresh browser (incognito, no personalisation). I paste each URL into a word counter tool and note the word counts. Last month for a client targeting "how to start a vegetable garden" the top 5 averaged 1,420 words. Their existing post was 650 words and thin on practical steps. I added a planting calendar section and a table of hardy vegetables, bringing the total to 1,500 words. The post went from page 4 to position 3 in six weeks. That is the core of my approach: benchmark the SERP, then write to cover every subtopic those pages address, plus one angle they miss. If the average is 2,000 words but I can cover the same ground in 1,200 because I write more tightly, I publish at 1,200. The number is a guide, not a target. I also check the readability of the top results. If they all use subheadings and short paragraphs, I mirror that. For the garden post, I added an image of a raised bed and a short video link, which boosted time on page by 40%. I always outline the post section by section, matching the SERP's headings at a minimum. Then I look for gaps. One competitor had a long section on soil pH but nothing on pest control. I added a "Common Pests and How to Deter Them" section. That unique content is often what pushes a post over the edge. I also factor in the expected engagement: if the query typically yields very short answers (like "how to change a tyre"), I keep it under 1,000 words. For a deep guide on [SEO copywriting](/seo-copywriting/), I expect 2,000+ because readers need examples and strategy. The path always ends with a final check: does this post fully answer the query? If yes, I stop writing, regardless of the word count.

The biggest trap is writing to a fixed word count. I once had a client who insisted every blog post must be at least 2,000 words. I wrote a post on composting that should have been 1,200 – I added a history of composting and three repetitive paragraphs. The post ranked poorly and readers bounced after 30 seconds. I now push back against arbitrary targets. Show the client the SERP data and explain that Google values usefulness, not wordiness. A second watch-out is copying competitor length without checking the quality of those pages. One competitor might have a 3,000-word post that is 40% fluff – you do not want to replicate that. Instead, identify which of those 3,000 words actually answer the query and which are padding. Your benchmark should be based on the genuinely useful content, not the total. Third, never publish a long post without formatting. A wall of 1,800 words with no subheadings, no bullet points, no images is unreadable. I use headings every 300 words at most, and I break lists into bullet points. I also insert an image related to each major section. On [blog SEO](/blog-seo/) posts, images that illustrate a concept can reduce bounce rate by 20%. Fourth, short posts are not inherently bad. A news announcement about a Google update might be 400 words and perfectly effective. A company update on [inbound marketing](/inbound-marketing/) results could be 300 words. Do not force length where it hurts. Finally, watch out for keyword cannibalisation. If you have two posts on similar topics, one long and one short, they may compete. I handle this by consolidating or by setting canonical tags. The short post should either be folded into the long one or explicitly marked as a summary. I audit my content every quarter with a [content audit](/content-audit/) to catch these issues.

For my first two years in SEO, I genuinely believed longer posts always outranked shorter ones. I read a study saying average first-page results were 1,900 words, so I aimed for 2,000 on every post. I added filler sentences, repeated points in different words, and once wrote a 2,400-word piece on "best soil for succulents" that should have been 800. That post never left page 6. Worse, a 1,100-word post I had written earlier on the same topic, which was concise and well-structured, held position 4. I had to delete the long version and redirect it to the short one. That lesson cost me weeks. I also misunderstood readability. I thought longer posts needed dense paragraphs to seem authoritative. In fact, the succulents post had a Flesch score of 38 (very difficult). The concise version scored 62. Readers stayed on the short one. Now I set a minimum readability goal (Flesch 60) for any post over 1,500 words. Another mistake: I ignored the SERP features. For "how long should a blog post be" the top result is often a featured snippet with a short, direct answer. I used to write a 2,000-word post that buried the answer. I lost the snippet to a 500-word page. Now I place the direct answer near the top in a short paragraph or a table, then expand. That tweak alone captured snippets for three different client posts last year. I also used to obsess over word count in the draft phase. I would stop writing at exactly 1,800 words even if I had more to say. That forced me to cut valid explanations. Now I write until the topic is covered fully, then I trim fluff and aim for the benchmark. The word count is a result, not a goal. I also learn from analytics: if a post ranks well but has a high bounce rate on the first 500 words, the problem is not length but the opening. I rewrite the introduction and add a table of contents. One post on [SEO content strategy](/seo-content-strategy/) dropped from 1,800 to 1,500 words after I removed irrelevant examples, and its organic traffic doubled. My final correction is to stop treating word count as a ranking factor. Google says it is not, and my experience confirms it. Completeness, readability, and intent alignment are what matter. I check the SERP, write to cover the topic, and only then glance at the word count.