Can Short Blog Posts Rank As Well As Long Posts?
Back when blogging was brand new (and when blogs were still called web logs) people wrote extremely short posts. Very short posts were the norm. Lots of people would regularly publish blog posts that were under 300 words long. Sometimes people would just post a few sentences that would make up a thought they were having.
Now, people would consider content of that length to be "micro-blogging". Those would be the sorts of posts left to sites like Twitter and Tumblr.
Over time, as blogging has grown to be a more widely practiced activity, people have generally moved to longer posts. Bloggers write posts that contain more information and which achieve larger word counts.
There could be a few different reasons why this has been the direction of the trend. It might just be that people are writing different types of content for their blogs. Blogs used to be online diaries. They were just a place to share brief stories of the things that were happening in the author's life, and for sharing their thoughts.
I could surely imagine writing very short posts if all I was doing was summarizing my daily activities. There wouldn't be much to expound on, and really no reason to bulk up the word count.
People Are Writing Articles and Essays
But people now tend to write posts that are more like articles and essays. Articles and essays are more substantial and more narrowly focused on some specific topic or idea. Rather than a pointless and meandering accounting of an author's movements, these sorts of writings are intended to stay on a topic and cover it in enough detail that the author feels they have fulfilled their purpose.
There might be many ways to define "article" and "essay", and what I am about to propose as the definitions I use are not being influenced by any research I've just done or the opinions of some dictionary. They are spontaneously made by me, and so they may be wrong.
I think an article is more factually based. An article would be some writing which is meant to be informational or educational. There is not much opinion involved. It just teaches or explains.
I think of an essay as being almost entirely opinion or argument. An essay proposes a thesis on some subject, then tries to explain the reasoning behind that position. An essay may refer to facts and outside sources to back up the arguments and to increase the credibility of what is being written, but the underlying purpose of the essay is to convince a reader of something opinion based.
These two styles of writing allow a writer to pick a narrow subject and work to cover it fully. And that tends to encourage more writing and greater word counts. And I suppose storytelling (whether they be true or fictional stories) would also be a style of writing which would encourage longer word counts.
Because these are the sorts of things often written on today's blogs, I think bloggers just naturally write more words per post. It is not intentional simply for the sake of writing more words, but more words are appropriate to convey the ideas.
I feel this way when I write blog posts. Sometimes I feel like I just want to write up a short post. I have a simple thing to say, and I just want to finish the post quickly and fire it off. But when I sit down to start writing, I find I actually have much more to say than I thought I did. I accidentally write long posts. It is not a goal I set for myself, and often it is the opposite of the goal I've set for myself. It just happens.
I will set out to write no more than 500 words, but before I know it I'll be past 2,000 words.
Longer Articles for SEO
The other main reason why blog posts might be getting longer has to do with bloggers trying to be successful with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Anyone who has ever researched topics like "How to make money online" or "How to get traffic to my blog" or "How to get my blog posts to rank in Google" has encountered the concept of SEO. SEO is a method of writing content so that it is useful to readers and will have a greater likelihood of ranking in Google's search results.
The reason someone would care to rank in Google's search results is because the higher your article ranks, the more people will click through to your article, and the more people you have coming to your website the more money you can potential make. People may have other reasons to want to rank, but I believe most people are doing it for the money at some level.
SEO is a subject that can be explained in different levels of complexity. You could spend months or years reading about SEO on different forums or in SEO courses. Lots of what is discussed is actually very fine details that make very little difference. People will talk about keyword density or specific interlinking patterns between different pages. All of those complex details might make a tiny bit of difference, but the fundamentals of SEO are really all a person needs to know to be successful with their website.
On a basic level, SEO is about writing content on subjects that people are searching for. People type search queries in to Google's search bar because they are seeking information. You want to write articles that would be the perfect result for those searches. You will naturally use keywords related to that subject if you are writing about that subject, so that is also a basic part of it. You want to use keywords that someone might type into a search bar to find your content.
Some people have done really large studies of Google's search results for lots of search terms and have found that longer content generally ranks best. It seems that you would want to write articles that are at least 1,000 words long, but ideally you would want them to be over 2,000 words. Because of this advice, which has been spread far and wide in the blogging and content creation world, bloggers try to write longer articles because they believe it is good for SEO and will help them rank their blog posts.
I'm not sure I fully believe that you need longer content in order to rank better. I think shorter articles can rank just fine, so long as they are good results for a given search term.
I do think there is an advantage to longer content, though. The advantage to longer content is that you will happen to use more keywords and varied keyword phrases throughout your articles. And by using more keywords naturally, you will have a chance to rank for more keywords. Regardless of your ranking position for any given keyword, you stand to attract more visitors if you are ranking for 1,000 keywords instead of 250. Writing more words would increase your chance of appearing in search results for more keywords.
Those are the two main reasons I believe that blogs have been posting longer and longer articles.
Shorter Posts Can Rank
I think that short blog posts can rank as well as any long post.
It is about the quality of the content, not its length. Google wants to display the best results, not the longest. So, if you write a great article on a topic, it will show up for keywords related to that topic regardless of its length.
I think there is a distinct advantage to writing shorter posts. While I don't believe people should be overly concerned with making their articles a particular length, whether that be long or short, I don't think anyone should worry about posting shorter content.
Writing longer posts takes more time. Unless you are a full-time blogger who has no need for a full-time job to pay your bills, you typically need to squeeze writing for your blog into the extra bits of time in your life. Sometimes you will start a post, then run out of time, and because it is going to be a longer post, you must finish writing that post over multiple sittings. That might mean that such an article would take days or weeks to finish.
And that means you aren't able to publish right away.
Publishing regularly and often is very important for SEO. Content takes time to gain Google's trust, and that time only starts ticking when it gets published on your blog. The earlier you can get something published to your blog, the sooner it will begin to get ranked in Google.
Writing shorter posts can ensure that you are publishing SOMETHING more often.
Another reason that shorter posts can be an advantage for SEO is that it allows you to write about more topics more quickly. I have noticed something interesting and strange in my Google Search Console performance results. That page shows me the keywords that Google is ranking me for. I have seen keywords in there that are made up of subjects from multiple articles.
This is a hypothetical example, but say I had a page about bicycles and another page about elephants. I didn't mention elephants in the bicycle content, and I didn't mention bicycles in the elephant content, but somehow I will get ranked for the keyword "elephants riding bicycles". Google just looked at the total content of my whole site and combined everything to decide what I should rank for.
Because of that, I stand to rank for more keywords if I write about more topics. Not just because I will rank for keywords related to more topics, but because I will rank for keywords that are made up of combinations of those topics.
The last reason I believe that shorter content can rank well has to do, again, with being able to publish more frequently. Google takes into account how much it can trust you as a source when it decides how to rank any of your individual articles. They look at something they call E-A-T. That is: Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
They want to see that you aren't just some scammer or spammer who threw up a few pages on the internet. They want to know that you would tend to write consistently good content. One thing that Google says they look for to judge whether you are a trustworthy authority is that you have written lots of content and have lots of pages on your site.
If you write lots of good content, it seems pretty likely that you will continue to produce good content. Getting more content published quickly can help you gain Google's trust faster. And once Google trusts your site, you will find it easier and faster to rank your new content as you publish it.
Conclusion
I have mostly written pretty long articles on this blog. Lots, if not most, of my articles are over 1,500 words. Many are over 2,000 words.
I want to try to write more articles that are less than 1,000 words. I want to aim for more shorter blog posts for the reasons I laid out in this article. I believe that it will help me cover more topics more quickly and that I will begin to attract readers that are interested in a greater variety of the things I want to write about.
I can't attract readers to things I find interesting unless I write something about it first. Shorter articles will help me write on more topics more quickly than I could with all long articles.
What are your own personal experiences with content length? Have you noticed a difference in how much traffic your long articles get compared to your shorter articles? Have you followed the common SEO advice to write longer content and avoided writing shorter posts? Do you think Google considers content length when deciding how to rank an article? Let me know in the comments!
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