If you’ve ever Googled, “SEO blog post word count,” chances are you’ve gotten really conflicting advice from around the internet. Hubspot says that blog post should be 2100 words, Buffer says 1600, Yoast says 1000 words or more.
Often people come to me after Googling this and ask, “Oh my god Meg, does every blog post that I create has to be 2500 words?” The answer is no, dear God know how exhausting would that be!
After all, we’re busy business owners, not full time writers. Cranking out epically long blog posts isn’t part of the job description that most of us want for our entrepreneurial life!
BUT. There are some hard & fast rules about minimum word count:
What’s the minimum blog post word count?
If your blog post is like 300 Words or less, Google will kind of not pay attention to it, it will think that it’s what’s called thin content, which is to say that it just doesn’t have enough there enough density enough interesting facts for people to find that they would want to read it.
So you need to find the sweet spot between those thin content posts, and the epic, you know, 2,000-10,000 words super posts.
Most blog posts should be at least 500-1000 words for SEO.
Does all content need to be 500 words? Even product descriptions and portfolio docs?
Now you’ll notice that I said 500 to 1000 words per blog post, that’s a rule for blog posts.
If you’re writing product descriptions or case studies or have a photo gallery: Not every page on your site needs to have 500 words!
Sometimes people can go overboard trying to hit a minimum word count for a piece of content that doesn’t need that much to be written! There’s only so much we can say about a red shirt, besides, “it’s red, and it’s a shirt. It goes on your body.” Trying to stretch that out to 500 words is rough!
How to stretch a post to hit the minimum 500 word count
You might be wondering, What if I can’t come up with 500 words to write about a specific topic? It happens sometimes. That’s okay, what I recommend that you do is zoom out.
So if you’re an interior designer and your goal is to write a blog post about neutral paint colors for your living room, like we do you want to get specific with our content that’s great, but you might just say here are the best 10 neutral paint colors for a living room, and that were like 300 words. So what you can do there is just take a step back and say, Okay, how do I transition into the next room. So maybe we’re talking about if you have a neutral color in your living room. What are you going to put in your dining room, what are you going to put in your kitchen, maybe you want to talk about having neutral colors on three walls in an accent.
What to consider instead of word count
Instead of worrying about hitting a minimum word count, or saying too much, I want you to change your perspective and think instead: Does this answer the question that people might be looking for?
Especially if we think about it from the perspective of somebody who was going to Google, they’re looking for a specific query, they are clicking on your website, do you answer the question that they would be asking?
If your post doesn’t answer the query, write more; if you feel like you can answer it in a concise way, that’s okay! Google actually really likes things that are concise as long as they answer a specific question.
Turn your shorter blog posts into longer posts
If you do eventually want to write one of those longer more well researched, 2,000-3,000 word cornerstone guide blog posts … What I would encourage you to do is start smaller posts and use them as building blocks to complete a larger post.
So let’s say that you’re a business coach, and you want to write a definitive guide, “everything that you need to know about time management for running your business.”
Instead of creating a giant post where you put *everything (*which can be difficult to organize & navigate), maybe instead you want to write one small 500-1,000 word blog post about thePomodoro method (using 25 minute timers), another one about time blocking, another one about having a morning routine, another about email management, etc.
Any of those many blog posts of 500 to 1000 words could be found for their specific needs. So people might not look for an entire post about time management if they just want to know what a Pomodoro is, but once you have those building block pieces, then you can use them to build them into “the definitive guide to everything you need to know about running your business.”
And that’s how you work your way up to 2500 word blog posts! Create smaller blog posts, and then you sew them together like a quilt.