How Long Should Your Articles Be?

Introduction

Blogging can be fun because you are sharing your knowledge with the world and hopefully you will find some readers along the way. Even though it is fun, there is still a lot that goes into the writing more than the writing itself. Most likely what you are thinking of as you write your articles is if you have any readers. You can always check Google Search Console and Google Analytics but there is something else also. Do you ever wonder if you are writing enough or too much for your readers? How much do you write for each of your articles? Do you just write until you run out of things to say? Do you have a certain length that you try to hit? There are many ways to approach what the ideal length is. When it comes to getting ranked on Google, sometimes we have to write enough to satisfy the search engine. That is the topic of this article. I will discuss some ideas that you can use to determine what the ideal article length is for your articles in your niche.

Content is King: This is What Search Engines and Users Are Looking For

This is a popular phrase in blogging that says that it really is the content that determines the success of your blog. Yes, there are other factors which include page load time and user experience. However, people come to your blog for mainly your articles. The other two factors are there to support the reading experience. So getting your words out onto “paper” is what we are here for and you must remember to keep your article keyword rich for the search engines. Otherwise, the search engine will not know what keywords your article should appear for. Next, let us talk about article length and see if we can come up with a “number”.

Should We Set a Minimum Number of Words Per Article? Maximum?

Technically, there is no perfect length that your article should be. Some articles will be longer than others depending on your knowledge of the topic and how much you plan to write about it. Some topics we have more interest in and have more to say than others. We do have to set some kind of minimum because too little can be too little. If you do not write enough, then Google will not have enough content to parse and determine what your keywords are. So you need to write enough so that the search engines can easily tell what your article is about. I cannot set a minimum for you, you need to see how much your competition is writing. That is simple to do. Just search for your keywords on Google and look at the first page results. Visit the top results and see how long their pages are. Then use these pages as a baseline.

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

Once you have an idea of how much your competition is writing, you should be able to write at least the same amount as them. You can always write less if you are concise and straight to the point. Some people write like this, just black and white and nothing else. Many others like to set the stage and prepare for everything before getting to the point. Which method you choose is dependent on you. Those who like to lead up before making a point will naturally write more and therefore have more content to share. You should try your best to do better than your competition and write more than them. This might be hard to come up with someone that your competition has not said yet. You do not have to worry about that because this is just one article. When you write your next set of articles, you might be well-versed in those topics compared to your competition. So you might have the edge later on.

Focus Writing on Your Specialty: You Might Out Compete Your Competition

As stated in the previous section, you just need to forge on and get those creative juices going. Sooner or later, you will find a topic that you know more about than everyone else. Most blogs receive their traffic from only a handful of pages. You just have to keep doing your keyword research using something like Ahrefs or SEMRush to know what you should write about. As long as you focus on what people want to read, then you finally get an article that does better and shows up on page one. This is not easy but you have to keep trying. 

I never gave a hard number to setting a minimum length to articles because that is really up to you and how much you are willing to write. Even though I recommend that you use your competition to determine your minimum length, that is just my advice. If you love to write and you can tie in your articles together, then the words will naturally flow together. I will talk about setting a maximum length later in this article.

Blogging Is More Than Just Getting Traffic: It is About the Whole Process

Do not worry so much if your articles are not performing as well as you want. Getting a high traffic article is just one part of blogging. Writing articles regularly and finding the best topics that suit you is another part. Continuing to write articles ensures that you are developing good habits and a schedule that you can actually stick to. We are in this for the long haul so just relex and enjoy the ride. Do not stress or burn out because you fall into the pressure of having to write so much. Eventually, you will have a readership but that takes time. Once you get there, you can still write articles at your leisure because you should have a lot of articles by the time you have loyal readers. If your articles are good, then they should keep your readers busy while you write some new stuff. 

Can an Article Be Too Long? How Do We Know When to Stop Writing?

If we look at Wikipedia, the Internet’s encyclopedia, articles can never be too long. I agree with that because blogging allows us to return to our articles and add more to them whenever we want. So articles can get longer and longer. This is beneficial for SEO because Google goes through your articles every now and then. So if Google sees that you updated an article with more content, then that gives Google more to work with. This gives your article a chance to rank higher because your article is becoming more in-depth and even more keyword rich. This is with the understanding that it answers the questions that people are asking on Google. The longer that your article is, the higher the chance that your article will satisfy the user’s search. So it is in our best interest to get good content that answers questions.

I mentioned earlier about different writing styles, straight to the point and setting the stage. Some people want a simple direct yes or no answer to their question. Longer articles can answer more questions. So if one part of an article answers someone’s question and another part of the article answers another person’s question, then the article satisfies both users. This means that one user had to scroll through a long article to get to their answer. Which is why we must make ample use of headings and a table of contents to help guide users to just the specific section of the article that they are interested in. Of course, you could have written two articles, one for each user. I prefer to just have the one longer article because it makes it easier when your articles stay on one topic instead of breaking everything up and run the risk of duplicating content and writing the same stuff over and over again.

Should We Stop Writing and Save Some Topics for Later Articles?

I touched upon this concept earlier using the example of one article answering different questions for two users. Sure you can stop your article early and save topics for later. You just have to organize them later so that you do repeat yourself. If you want to write shorter articles and save topics for later, then consider planning to write a pillar article in the future. A pillar article is a great way to discuss many different topics that fall under an underlying theme. This is what I recommended as part of your content strategy so that you at least have some focus and organization to your topics. Do not just start writing on random topics that do not link to your other articles or stray too far from your niche. Google is trying to find out what your blog as a whole is about, not just the articles. If you write an article that falls outside your niche then it will not rank as well as if it were on another website with a related niche. So try to stay in your lane.

Not Enough Content? Do Some Research or Link to Your Existing Articles

We all want to be ranked on Google so we try to outwrite to outrank your competition. This can be difficult because we have to surpass our competition with at least the same quality of content. Writing something better means that we have to add more content from other related topics in order to strengthen our article. Here are a couple of ideas that you can use to get some more content out when you have not quite reached your word limit yet.

Research Related Topics for Your Article and See If There Are Any Changes or Trends

We can only know so much as humans because there is a great wide world out there. Everyday things are happening, things are changing and there is always something new going on. As excited as it is to live in a world where there is always something new to look forward to, this can also be intimidating and daunting. Why? The reason why is because there are so many new changes and trends to keep up with, we can easily fall behind if we stop researching regularly. Of course, you should not worry about this because some trends fizzle out and some take a long time before the main populace catches winds and accepts them. This is great for you because you will be one of the first to talk about and give insight to this brand new trend.

Researching is a common theme on this blog because I talked about how the web changed our lives. This is mainly due to the fact that information is available so easily now at our fingertips due to cell phones. As bloggers we spend a lot of our time writing, producing content. As much as we produce we must also consume at the same time. Information that we consume is processed and we are able to produce insightful thoughts, opinions and conclusions from them. I have another article where I talk about the cycle of information consumption and production. Due to this cycle, we should be able to produce enough content to outrank your competition. This will just take longer because we all run out of steam when writing and need to stop to research and consume more information. Then we process the information, draw some conclusions from it and integrate it into our writing.

No Pressure If You Cannot Write More, Just Publish and Move On

Sometimes we get so burnt out, churning word after word. We try really hard to write the best articles that we can because first impressions do matter in most cases. Sure, we can stop and write more later but if your blog has traffic then your readers will read the first version of your article when published. Since we try so hard to make everything perfect, we are under so much pressure to write more and more. In some cases, we even resort to AI generated content because we need help writing. If you have just hit your word limit and want to stop, go right ahead. Yes, the content is mostly what ranks on your website on Google but remember that there will be other articles that you write. Also, there are other activities that need to be done other than just writing one article.

So do not focus too much on a single article. If it performs well, great. If not, then there are other things you can be doing on your blog to make it better. I just want to make sure that you do not get too hung up on a single article because it is not worth it. Just publish your article and move on.

Summary

Writing articles is the heart of any blog. Many people think that you need a specific length to rank but really just look at your competition on the first page and see how their articles are. At least this way, you will know how much more you need to write than them. There is no need to set a maximum length on your article because the more that you write, then the more Google has to work with when deciding where you should rank on its search engine. So if you have a lot of knowledge to share on a particular topic and want to write a lot, then go at it. If your long, lengthy and detailed article is that good, it should show up high on the rankings on Google. 

Sometimes we think that we should split our article up into smaller ones so that our readers can digest our writing easier. These are called pillar articles and you can split sections of your article into pieces and just link to the pieces. Then your main article can focus on unifying all of the sections into an underlying theme. When you need to write a little bit more because you feel like your article is simply not long enough, then do some research and see if you can find some new changes or trends in your topic. This will give you some more to write about plus modernize your article since you will be adding research to it. Once you feel like you cannot write anymore, then just publish it.

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