Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

60The Ideal Length for Blog Posts, Podcast, Facebook Posts, Tweets, and Other Marketing Content

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

I get this a lot. Maybe you do, too. Clever Chicago-based marketer Andy Crestodina did the research and compiled the length guidelines for 10 common types of content, shown in the following graphic. He compiled most of the data from studies that analyzed the high performers, based largely on search engine preferences and nuances. But there are some handy nuggets in here that relate to human writers and readers, too.

A quick explanation follows the chart, with some sources cited that back up Andy's research results.

If you are looking for more, check out the full monty on Andy's site at OrbitMedia.com (http://bit.ly/IdealAndy).

Length Guidelines for 11 Kinds of Content

1. Blog post. The ideal length for a search-optimized blog post is 1,500 words. “Google is a research tool,” Andy writes. “Longer pages have more opportunities to indicate their relevance. Google sees longer pages as more likely to contain the answer to the searcher's question.”
   1. See: Kevin Espiritu, “How Important is Content Length? Why Data-Driven SEO Trumps Guru Opinions,” serpIQ, April 26. 2012, http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions.

   That doesn't mean longer content (more than 1,500 words) isn't warranted when the subject ...