When you want to start blogging there are a few questions that you may ask your self. What is a blog? , How do I make money blogging? and How long should a blog post be for SEO? answer to the previous question you can find in other posts. Here we are going to talk about how long your blog post should be in order to get ranked on Google.
If you would like to get ranked on Google your blog post should be at least 300 words. However, as you may know, every single day there are more and more people starting to blog and creating their own websites. If you are wondering why the answer is a website is a very cost-effective method to get massive exposure. Starting a blog will cost you almost $100 for the first year to start, however, if you know what you doing and put in valuable content you may see a flood of visitors and potential customers to your website.
You don’t even have to sell your own products, you can use the affiliate marketing business model to get commission by promoting other peoples products. So the competition is getting higher which means 300 words is not going to be enough to get ranked on the first page of Google.
Why Google loves lengthy content?
If you check out Google analytics you can basically see that Google is implicitly telling you what they are looking for in a content.
When you look at the picture above you can see that Google knows how many people are coming to your websites with the number of “Users”. How long they stay on your page with “Session Duration” and how fast they leave your website with “Bounce Rate”.
If you write an in-depth and long content you can increase the “Session Duration” and if you manage to make the content engaging you will reduce the “Bounce Rate”. Google wants to show the best content to the user, and that would be content that is engaging and people going to stay on the website for a longer period of time without getting bored.
Also with lengthy text, Google has more clue about what your content is about. Lengthy text can also help you to get ranked for the keywords that you are willing to rank by naturally repeating them in the content without keyword stuffing.
This can also help you to rank for longer tail keywords that you may have never thought about even ranking for them by mentioning them multiples times in your text. This can increase your chances of showing up in search results for other keywords as well.
Once you can manage to do Google is going to show you some love by showing your content on the first page. Therefore contents that have 1000 words or more or going to do a better job depending on your nice.
How lengthy should your content be in your niche?
1000 words to 2000 words would be enough for most niches but, for some specific contents that are not still enough. So if you are not sure how long your content should be this is how you can find out.
1000 words to 2000 words would be enough for most niches but, for some specific contents that are not still enough. So if you are not sure how long your content should be for SEO purposes this is how you can find out.
Search for the keyword that you would like to rank for, also make sure that you are not going to for a difficult keyword that will make you compete with really high authority websites. Check out the top 10 results for that keyword in Google search results. If every single page that you opened up has 3000 or more keywords that would be really tough for you to compete with those websites with an article that has only 1000 to 2000 keywords.
The answer is very obvious people are going to stay longer on a page that takes them more time to read as long as it is engaging. You may be wondering if you can still rank on the first page with shorter content. The answer is YES 🙂 want to know how?
How to outrank other pages with less content?
First solution:
So to outrank more lengthy content with smaller content it basically depends on a couple of factors like how competitive that keyword is and how many authority websites are trying to rank for those keywords.
The thing you can do in this scenario is to keep the user staying on your website don’t know how? Simple, you need to create other content that is related to your main content and link them to those pages on your site.
One thing to remember is to make sure that to make sure those links are opening in a new window. Because if you open a new link inside your current page it basically increases your bounce rate. This is not what you want.
So when a user comes to your website when though it looks a the short page you are sending them to your other pages on your website. Meaning your first page is going to be open for a longer period of time. This sends a signal to Google that the page is engaging and people are staying for a longer period. As a result, your page is going to get ranked higher in search results.
Before you get ranked on Google make sure to submit your site map and page to Google.
Second solution:
Another method outrank longer in-depth articles with the shorter articles is to use the power of videos. Think about this when you have a 500 words article that takes a minute or two to read to won’t have much chance to get to the first page for many niches.
However, I have seen 500 words articles sitting on the first page for more than a few years and when I check the article the only difference is that they have a related video on the same page.
All you need to do it add a video related to the topic you are talking about, you don’t even have to create the video. To make the process easy go to youtube and find a related video and as long as you can click the share button and get that share URL to can use the same video in your blog.
This can help your visitors stick around for a longer amount of time which increases your duration time and as a result, a better position in Google ranking.