Short vs. long-form content: Which is best for your blog?

Have you ever considered how the word length of your blog posts can affect everything from your website’s search engine rankings to the number of leads generated by your content marketing strategy? If you’ve ever wondered whether you should be writing shorter or longer content to maximize your blog’s ROI, then here’s what you need to know about short versus long-form content:

Short-Form Content is More Feasible

How long does it take you (or your hired writers) to research, write, proofread and publish a blog post? Generally speaking, the longer the content is, the more time it’ll take, which equates to higher costs as well. Meanwhile, short-form content ensures you can regularly publish new, high-quality content on your blog without having to worry about sporadic gaps in your publishing schedule or going over budget when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

Short-form content should be at least 250 words to be effective and no more than 750 words to maintain your audience’s attention throughout the article. Another advantage to short-form content is that it avoids repetitiveness (repeating the same information, just with different words), which is a common problem experienced by long-form content writers who may run out of fresh ideas once they get past the 1,200 word mark.

Long-Form Content is Ideal for SEO

According to the top blogging statistics for 2019, the average blog post is 1,050 words long and the average length of top-performing blog content in Google searches ranges between 1,140-1,285 words. Although further research shows that long-form content can generate as much as 9x more leads than short-form content, just 18% of companies regularly publish blog posts that are longer than 750 words.

Additionally, there are many search engine optimization benefits to publishing long-form content, including: more backlinks, more social shares, better rankings on Google search, and so much more. If you want to increase your website’s ranking in the search engines, then producing high-quality, well-researched content in the 1,500-2,000 word range would be ideal for your SEO strategy.

Best Solution: Variety of Content Lengths?

Unless your marketing budget is exceptionally generous, you likely won’t be able produce long-form content often enough to satisfy your audience. However, this doesn’t mean you should solely focus on producing short-form content, either. For best results, you should experiment with a variety of content lengths and analyze your most valuable metrics (leads generated, backlinks acquired, social shares, etc.) to determine what the ideal length of your blog posts should be.