Neil Patel is the creator of QuickSprout, a business and marketing blog. That website earns him over $1 million per year, with 90% of that revenue coming from free traffic. The guy knows more than a little bit about boosting your blog traffic, and he discovered something about blog post links that you can immediately put to work to improve the amount of free traffic you get from the search engines.
The “No One Reads Long Content” Myth
Social media is full of extremely short messages. The human attention span is shorter than it has ever been. These and a lot of other factors have led to a belief that no one will read a long blog post or article on your website. To address this belief, we need to ask a couple of questions.
1 – Would you read a free 2,000 word piece of content on a topic you are interested in, that answers a lot of important questions, and delivers value to your life?
2 – Would you spend any time reading a 200 word piece of content on a topic you are not interested in, for any reason at all?
You may care deeply about personal weight loss issues. You may be a single women over 50 years of age. If you stumbled across a blog post titled “The Little-Known Secret to ‘Keep It Off’ Weight Loss for Single Women 50 and Older”, you are highly likely to read that information, even if the post is 5,000 words long.
If the topic did not interest you, you may not even finish reading that headline. This brings us to a very important point that Neil Patel has to tell us about the length of your blog posts, if laser-targeted, free traffic, and lots of it, is something you are looking for.
“Longer posts usually perform better on every level.”
A higher word count almost always results in more search engine traffic. This happens for a few reasons. In the first place, you have a lot more content, so the search engines can get a very good idea of what your content is about. It also means that once you engage with web surfers interested in that particular topic, you have a better chance at providing real value, answering big questions, and solving important problems related to that topic. This boosts the amount of time someone stays on that webpage, which is one of the influencers in search engine algorithms.
Patel reports that SerpIQ studied thousands of blog posts, trying to determine if length had a positive or negative correlation with search engine traffic. Across the board, across different niches and topics, the average content length of the top 10 results in Google was 2,000 words or higher. You probably understand how important it is to reach page 1 on Google.
People very seldom look past the first page of search engine results. This is because, as mentioned earlier, people have shorter attention spans. They simply will move on to something else if they do not see something that grabs their attention. This research, and independent studies from other important bloggers and web gurus, shows the importance of writing blog posts more than 2,000 words long.
Of course, you still have to provide value. You still have to stay relevant. You still should be on topic for the overall market or niche that your website is concerned with. However, to really engage your customers while ensuring the search engines send you a lot of free, laser-targeted traffic, you should be writing epic blog posts of at least 2000 words.
