Just this morning I was asked this question and immediately thought (and said), I perhaps should write a blog post about that!

The short answer is; 300 words is the minimum and about 500 words is the maximum. Now there may be some debate about the maximum as Google advocates that you should write about a thousand words. Really!! How many people want to read a thousand word blog post! Even Yoast.com says that there’s a good chance you’ll scare off a lot of your audience with so much text.

Admittedly, the more words on the page, the more chance Google has of understanding what your post is about but I still think a thousand words is a bit much and difficult for most people to write. Certainly me.

Did you see that I just wrote the words, ‘Google has of understanding’? Very important that is. Why? Remember how I go on about Google being a semantic search engine? That Google understands the context and meaning of a web page and doesn’t rely on the actual words on the page? My opinion is that as long as your blog posts are in context and are relevant, then 500 words is plenty to write. It certainly has worked very well for me in the past.

I should just add in here that although you should write between 300-500 words in a blog post. Not the same is true for your web pages. Sales pages as I like to call them. Here 300 words is the maximum. Why? Well the point of your web pages should be to elicit contact. You want a visitor to email you or pick the phone up. Your sales pages should only have enough information on the them to prompt the call to action. You then ‘Close the deal’ when they have contacted you. I’m not saying that you won’t have some pages on your site that are purely informational, but really your website is there to evoke a response. i.e. get them to pick up the phone to you.

Blog posts are in the main, for traffic generation. Yes they must be good quality. Relevant and contextually accurate but getting people to visit your site is what counts.

That’s it for today. Any questions? If you have, feel free to call me on 01603 383477 or send me an email.

That’s about 390 words by the way 🙂