Blog Quality vs Blog Length: What’s Important?

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What should be the length of an effective blog post?
3. Tips for writing good blogs
4. What do quality and length mean for a blog?
5. What are the benefits and challenges of lengthy blog posts?
6. Final words
7. FAQs

With the humongous variety of content available online today, pleasing readers is no longer an easy task. Bloggers are always in a quandary about how to boost blog traffic and increase the number of subscribers and followers. They keep formulating new strategies to catch the attention of audiences. 

This has given rise to a raging debate on the quality and ideal length of blog posts. The question is, is it better to write a short, quality post than a long-form one that may not hold a reader’s attention? 

Well, let’s seek some answers to this question. Also, follow the blog writing tips this post provides you with.

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What Should the Length of an Effective Blog Post Be?

What is the best word count for a blog? Well, that’s a million-dollar question. The length of a blog post really matters. Content marketing has scaled newer heights over the past few years. It is important to follow trends as your blogs attract visitors and convert your leads into potential customers. Identifying the ideal blog length is an important factor. The length of a blog post is determined by the purpose of the blog and the niche it belongs to. 

Here are a few examples of blog posts with varying lengths:

• Very short articles of 200-400 words – these articles are good for increasing engagement but are not ideal for SEO. Usually, these articles are introductory and for product description.
• Short articles of 400-600 words – these blogs are of minimum length. Short blogs are beneficial for social shares and are not explanatory posts.
• Medium-size articles of 600-1000 words – the articles are good for educational posts and helps in link-building. It is the preferred length for blogs and SEO.
• Long articles of 1000-1500 words – these articles are ideal for lead conversion and these make an impact on readers. These are good for call-to-action (CTA) and link-building.
• Very long articles of word limit up to 3000 – very long articles have the highest ranking. It is the preferred length for guest posting. Such articles include a lot of reference posts and links.

To create valuable content, content length is important and drives organic traffic. 

Tips for Writing a Good Blog

Undoubtedly length plays an important role for blogs but along with that, it is important to maintain the quality of blogs:

• Create an outline of what you want to write – creating an outline of a blog helps you in assembling what you want to write. You can remove or add points and create a draft of your blog.
• Identify your audience – before you start writing your blog, it is necessary to recognize the audience. It will give a clear picture of what to write about and whom to target. 
• Trim the extra lines – re-read the article after writing to remove unwanted sentences. Reviewing/editing your own article is necessary.
• A perfect headline – Without an interesting headline, no one will get attracted to your blog post. Readers will first read your headline, then move towards your content. It acts as a window for your blog.
• No convolutions, please – avoid using long sentences and paragraphs in your blogs. Break them into small pieces as it makes your content easy to understand and readable. Short sentences also improve your reach and help with SEO.

What do Quality and Length Mean in a Blog?

Before we dive into the details of what works the best – quality or length, it is essential to understand what each of them means in the world of blogging.

Quality is associated with substantiated information that is highly meaningful, valid, and resolves readers’ problems. Developing quality in posts is one of the most important tasks of writing. Ensuring quality in blog posts means expressing a vast amount of information using short and meaningful sentences that are easy to understand.

The length of a blog post is associated with the number of words used by bloggers in expressing ideas and communicating information. Ideal blog length depends upon the kind of information being communicated. It also depends on the social media platform selected for posting blogs.

What are the Benefits and Challenges of Creating Quality Blog Posts?

Benefits

• Builds trust in readers: When a writer posts a blog, he/she aims to increase followers. They follow a blogger who delivers the latest or significant information. The quality of a blog also depends on continuously resolving the queries of followers, which ultimately increases traffic and attracts more readers. 

• Boosts promotion: Every content writer wants his/her blogs to be read by many people. And if these people like your posts, they share them with their contacts, coaxing them to read such posts. Writers can also ask followers to share the posts on social platforms they use to attract new readers.
  
• Creates opportunities: A good blog post helps in increasing the popularity of the blogger. A sizeable number of subscribers and followers attracts brands. And thus, bloggers can earn money through marketing activities. Great blogs raise advertisement revenue and are one of the ways of increasing earnings through the Cost Per Click campaign.

• Provides satisfaction: Creating content is an art. If bloggers can satisfy readers’ curiosity with the blogs they posted, this endeavor increases the bloggers’ self-confidence and provides work satisfaction. This stage of self-contentment automatically brings in fame and money. 

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• Displays expertise: Longer posts create a positive impression on subscribers and followers. It shows that you have a vast amount of content along with detailed information. Lengthier blogs enable writers to show their expertise by organizing information appropriately and adding infographics and other visual elements. They also make readers realize the dedication you have towards educating and helping them.

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• Gives detailed information: Blog posts can be of any length depending upon the writer’s or employer’s preferences. However, it is convenient for writers to write lengthier blogs since they can then delve into details of the subject and convince readers about the information.
  
• Improves SEO: Google continuously updates its search algorithms, but one thing remains constant – providing better search rankings to long-form blog posts. Lengthy blog posts comprise more CTAs and inspire numerous backlinks to improve SEO. 

• Increases sharing: Compared with shorter blog posts, readers tend to share the content of longer blogs more on social media platforms. According to the Content Marketing Institute, blogs with more than 2000 words are shared by more people than blogs of 1000 words.

Challenges

• It is time-consuming: Writers need to invest a lot of time in creating quality blogs that require quite a bit of research and development. When writers invest time in producing quality content, they usually can’t find the time to perform other promotional and marketing practices.

• Is more expensive: Ensuring good content quality requires accessing information from official websites that charge subscription fees. Also, quality content is free of grammatical errors and sentence repetitions that involve using expensive software tools to monitor the quality.

• Limits visitors: When writers do not get the time to engage in promotional activities of blogging while concentrating on pure quality, they fail to target new audience segments.

• Hard to write and edit: Writing lengthier posts is difficult as compared to shorter ones. It takes more time to collect information and present it attractively. It also leads to the difficulty of arranging the information.

• Shorter attention spans: Readers often ignore lengthy blog posts and do not take out time to read all the details mentioned in the posts. While reading lengthy blog posts, there are higher chances of readers losing interest as they reach the ending of the posts. Thus, they fail in extracting informative details, finding long posts ineffective.

• High outsource costs: Many times, blog writing and managing is outsourced by companies, and the word count becomes directly proportionate to the money being spent. It becomes expensive to write long posts in case of outsourcing.

Final Words

Choosing between quality and quantity in blog writing is difficult. While writing lengthy and detailed blogs, writers need to focus on two significant caveats: 

One, every word you mention in the post should serve the objective of writing that post. The second is that quality is as important as the length of the blog. Without quality, a lengthy blog post is also meaningless. It creates a negative impression on audiences who then perceive your blog as invaluable for future reading.

Bloggers should ensure that they are always creating engaging content while maintaining quality and retaining a decent length to make their blogs worth reading.

Key Takeaways

• Very short articles are good for increasing engagement but not ideal for SEO.
• Very long articles have the highest ranking.
• Quality is associated with substantiated information.
• Creating content is an art. 
• Both length and quality are important. 

FAQs