Neil Patel is the creator of QuickSprout, a business and marketing blog. That website earns him over $1 million per year, with 90% of that revenue coming from free traffic. The guy knows more than a little bit about boosting your blog traffic, and he discovered something about blog post links that you can immediately put to work to improve the amount of free traffic you get from the search engines.
The “No One Reads Long Content” Myth
Social media is full of extremely short messages. The human attention span is shorter than it has ever been. These and a lot of other factors have led to a belief that no one will read a long blog post or article on your website. To address this belief, we need to ask a couple of questions.
1 – Would you read a free 2,000-word piece of content on a topic you are interested in, that answers a lot of important questions, and delivers value to your life?
2 – Would you spend any time reading a 200-word piece of content on a topic you are not interested in, for any reason at all?
You may care deeply about personal weight loss issues. You may be a single women over 50 years of age. If you stumbled across a blog post titled “The Little-Known Secret to ‘Keep It Off’ Weight Loss for Single Women 50 and Older”, you are highly likely to read that information, even if the post is 5,000 words long.
If the topic did not interest you, you may not even finish reading that headline. This brings us to a very important point that Neil Patel has to tell us about the length of your blog posts, if laser-targeted, free traffic, and lots of it, is something you are looking for.
“Longer posts usually perform better on every level.”
A higher word count almost always results in more search engine traffic. This happens for a few reasons. In the first place, you have a lot more content, so the search engines can get a very good idea of what your content is about. It also means that once you engage with web surfers interested in that particular topic, you have a better chance of providing real value, answering big questions, and solving important problems related to that topic. This boosts the amount of time someone stays on that webpage, which is one of the influencers in search engine algorithms.
Patel reports that SerpIQ studied thousands of blog posts, trying to determine if length had a positive or negative correlation with search engine traffic. Across the board, across different niches and topics, the average content length of the top 10 results in Google was 2,000 words or higher. You probably understand how important it is to reach page 1 on Google.
People very seldom look past the first page of search engine results. This is because, as mentioned earlier, people have shorter attention spans. They simply will move on to something else if they do not see something that grabs their attention. This research and independent studies from other important bloggers and web gurus shows the importance of writing blog posts more than 2,000 words long.
Of course, you still have to provide value. You still have to stay relevant. You still should be on topic for the overall market or niche that your website is concerned with. However, to really engage your customers while ensuring the search engines send you a lot of free, laser-targeted traffic, you should be writing epic blog posts of at least 2000 words.
Yes, if it is interesting, I will tend to stick with a post to the end (IF I have the time, which I don’t always). I have a blogging friend who writes very long (yes, I would call them epic) posts about gardening, and life in Nebraska. Hers, I read. On the other hand, if the first couple of paragraphs don’t grab me, I am gone, regardless of length. So I checked my stats for my all time “most traffic” post, and it was a post on a zombie Halloween display in Yonkers. I can’t remember how epic it was in word length, but I remember how the spammers loved it – that’s the reason why it had so many hits. Hmmm, maybe I should rerun it and see what happens this time?
How very interesting! That is a good question to debate… Is “bad” traffic still good? Of course, I prefer “good traffic” (i.e., real people) visiting the site vs. “bad traffic” (robots and spammers), but both do raise the traffic stat numbers!
I have mixed feeling about this. I have seen the statistics- and they tell a story. But…
1. My data indicates that while longer blog posts may augment visits- most folks do NOT read the entire document. So, if you goal is eyeballs on the first few paragraphs (and maybe the last one)- go for it. If you goal is to educate and inform, break the post down into a multi-day series. (Like I am doing this week.)
2. I believe the longer form is the document we can let folks download (or PURCHASE 馃檪 ) when they register on the shorter form post.
But, that’s my opinion.
When people are doing research and learning about a topic, a long post can be helpful. A technical blog post on increasing website speed, for example, may have someone reading with intent on each point. And it can quickly be dismissed as well.
Thanks for the information…it definitely makes me feel better. Lots of my posts tend to run on the longer side and even though I try my best to make them easily skimmable, I always wonder if, in our ‘fast food society’ I should be making my posts much shorter.
Put in Section Headers and let the reader decide how much and what to read!
I think my wordiest posts are my countdowns to the holidays and they may not even touch 500. Did I mention that I am a very good listener? Thanks for the info!
You are welcome, Trish! LOL
Yes, interesting. I am a short attention spanner. I write that way, too. Though I strive for 1000 words post, I’ve never reached my goal. Usually I do have a feel when my post is good one or not. And as a reader, unless the post really grabs me, I don’t make it to the end of a long one.
The length is really as long as necessary to get the point across, I agree!
Well I can see I need to add a bit more words to my blogs. Sometimes I can go on and on while other times I may end them to quickly. Thanks for the info.
Always keep your audience in mind – some folks do not like to consume a lot when reading a blog. Others do!