• How long should a blog post be?
• What’s the minimum word count required to rank in the top 10 search results on Google?
• Should every blog post be long form in the post-Hummingbird era?

I’m sure you’ve spent countless hours doing research on the internet, rummaging through various articles to find an answer that’s convincing and really applicable to your industry.

This research is quite valid.

After all, as bloggers and content marketers, it’s our job to create content that’s optimized for maximum traffic, social shares, and conversions. Therefore, we need to ensure that the blog post we are about to publish is positioned to get more shares, backlinks, and of course, traffic.

In this article, we’ll shed light on how long your blog post should be and also reveal ways in which you can arrive at the right word count for your post for any topic.

What’s the Ideal Word Count?

There was a time when the ideal word count for a blog post was somewhere between 300 to 800 words. There are publications which still follow this rule and benefit greatly from it. (more on that a bit later)

But ever since the Google Hummingbird algorithm update, long form articles have dominated search engine result pages.

Let’s take a look at three different studies that prove this to be the case.

A study conducted by serpIQ found the average content length of top 10 search results to be over 2000 words. In fact, the top 5 results were articles with over 2300 words.

An even more elaborate study by Backlinko found that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.

And finally, a study on Google search ranking factors by SEMrush found that long-form content tends to rank higher in SERPs for high-volume keywords.

So the key takeaway from all these studies is that long-form content ranks higher in search results than short-form content. Moreover, the average word count of a Google first page result is close to 2,000 words.

But is this applicable to all industries? Perhaps not.

Viperchill did an in-depth analysis of top 5 blogs from 8 different industries to see the average post length of each. Here’s what the study found:

As you can see, gadget, web news, and gossip blogs tend to publish shorter articles. This should come as no surprise as these blogs publish multiple times during the day. On the other hand, marketing, finance, and personal development blogs publish long-form articles, but post less (1-7 times per week). Also, the topics covered in these niches are quite complex which require in-depth analysis and explanation.

So, the question still remains. How long should a blog post be?

The answer lies in doing a bit of research on the top blogs or publications in your niche. This is where a tool like SEMrush’s SEO Content Template can make your life easy.

The SEO Content Template is a tool within SEMrush that helps SEOs and marketers develop SEO-friendly content. The tool provides basic SEO tips to help you create content that outranks your rivals on the SERPs for your target keywords.

In the next section, we’ll explain how you can leverage this tool to arrive at the ideal word count for your blog post with two examples from different industries.

How to Use SEO Content Template to Arrive at the Right Post Length

You’ll need an SEMrush account for this section. If you don’t have an SEMrush account yet, you can get a 30-day free access to SEMrush GURU by clicking here ($199.95 value).

Below is a video tutorial of SEO Content Template. You could also scroll down to find step-by-step instructions on how to use SEMrush‘s SEO Content Template.

Here’s how the SEO Content Template tool works:

1. You enter keywords that you want to target with your content in the SEO Template search box.
2. SEMrush analyzes content on the Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your target keywords.
3. On the basis of these top 10-ranking pages, SEMrush provides key recommendations for creating content that’s optimized for SEO. These recommendations include semantically related words, backlinks that you should you try to target, readability and ideal text length.

Side note: SEMrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that can help you with more than just content length. Read my full review of the software, or start your 30 day free trial to test it out for yourself!

Now let’s deep dive into using this tool. The first example deals with a marketing topic and the second one deals with a topic that’s trending in the gadget world at the moment.

Login to your SEMrush dashboard and click on SEO Content Template on the left hand navigation menu just below Topic Research Tool.

In the first example, I entered the target keywords “link building tips” into the SEO Template search box and found these results:

The top 10 search results included the usual suspects from the SEO industry – Moz, Backlinko, Matthew Woodward, CMI Institute, and so on.

The recommended text length for this topic is 4,469 words. This is based on the average word count of the top 10 posts for the seed keywords. Understandably, most sites featured here have published mammoth guides for link building and are therefore ranking in the top 10 SERPs.

If you scroll down, you can see exactly how your competitors using your target keywords:

You can click on each of the results to be taken to the respective post on your target keywords. Here’s an example from Backlinko:

Now let’s move on to the second example. In this case, I’ve picked “google duplex” which is a widely discussed topic in the gadget world right now.

Some of the sites ranking in Google top 10 are tech and gadget blogs like the Verge, TechCrunch, CNET, and so on. The ideal text length for the target keywords is 717 words which is slightly on the higher side for gadget blogs, but the controversial nature of Google Duplex is bound to attract thought-provoking articles from other news publications as well.

Once again, when you scroll down, you can see exactly how other sites are using the target keywords in their content:

You can click on any of the links to read the accompanying article for the target keywords. Here’s an example from Engadget which is one of the top gadget blogs:

Conclusion

There is no hard and fast rule on the length of an ideal blog post. Having said that, research suggests short-form articles rarely dominate search engine results. A few exceptions are news websites, especially in the gadget and entertainment segments.

When it’s all said and done, long-form articles which cover a topic in-depth tend to rank higher in search engine result pages. Furthermore, such articles also attract more links and social shares. As such, it’s important that you do your research before you start writing your article and arrive at the ideal post length on the basis of the average word count for top 10 ranking pages in SERPs for your target keywords.

If you want to save yourself some time or are giving articles to your content writer, I highly recommend utilizing SEMrush’s SEO Content Template. Let this tool do the hard research work for you, so you can focus on the more important stuff.

With the word count in mind, you’ll be better positioned to dominate SERPs for your target keywords and beat the competition.

If you found this article useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

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The post [Answered] How Long Should a Blog Post Be? appeared first on 99signals.

Hello there, inbound marketers! Welcome to the very first interview in the 99signals Interview Series. This interview series will feature stories and business advice from successful bloggers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

For this interview, we had the privilege of inviting Pardeep Goyal, founder of CashOverflow.

Pardeep is a self-confessed finance geek, content marketing expert, and a growth consultant for early-stage startups. He worked with an IT company for 7 years as the Tech lead before quitting to co-found two startups – SchoolGennie and PocketScience.

After not finding success with his first two startups, he founded CashOverflow in May 2015 to help people generate passive income and achieve financial freedom.

Since its launch in May 2015, CashOverflow has grown organically and currently has a traffic of 200,000 visitors per month.

A big thanks to Pardeep for taking the time to answer our questions.

Tell us a bit about your blog, CashOverflow.

CashOverflow is a personal finance blog focused on two things — financial independence & financial freedom. These two terms may sound similar, but there is a subtle difference between both.

Financial independence is having income from multiple sources so that you don’t depend on your salary. First you have to come out of the slavery of 9-to-5 job.   

Financial freedom is about building enough wealth so that you no longer stress about money and care about things in life that are beyond money.

We don’t talk about having 5 crores in your bank and retire rich. We talk about enjoying your life today when you are young and passionate. You can enjoy rich life even with your regular income.

With that focus, CashOverflow provides practical insights on saving money, investing money in Indian stocks, and earning passive money.

My vision is to help people in establishing a second source of income — and then hold their hands to manage their money & business whether they are earning through Freelancing, Consulting, Blogging or Startup.

If you land on my website, you will either learn something to save money or earn passive income.

Can you share the story behind CashOverflow? How did it all start?

Though I failed at my initial startup attempts, it was clear to me that I had to start an online business given my love for entrepreneurship and the freedom it would entail.

To figure out what I really wanted to start, I did the following exercise:

Step 1: Wrote down my ideas.

Step 2: Wrote down my primary & secondary side skills.

Step 3: Wrote down my core interests including the areas that I am passionate about.

Step 4: Recalled when I helped someone the last time and made him happy.

Post this exercise, I realized that personal finance is one area I was really passionate about. From financial news, financial products, using credit cards to save money, money saving hacks on shopping & travel, investment related philosophies, income tax laws, and so forth.

This combined with my growing love for content marketing made CashOverflow a no brainer for me.

That’s how I started CashOverflow in May, 2015 as a hobby project and worked on it part time almost for a year. I slowly got a hang of it and started loving it but I was not making any money from CashOverflow.

I am working full time on CashOverflow from September 2016.

I published my annual income report for my readers and will keep publishing income report every year.

So, without worrying about money and failure, I went ahead to build CashOverflow as my full time business.

What is your content creation process? And how do you generate traffic to your site?

My content creation process involves a short-term and a long-term strategy.

The short-term strategy is focused on creating viral content and the long-term strategy involves improving SEO of existing articles to increase search traffic to the blog.

I’ve always focused on quality rather than quantity. I published only 18 articles in the first year. But people loved whatever I published.

The short-term strategy became successful as the articles I wrote became viral and brought in the necessary traffic to CashOverflow.

Similarly, for the long-term strategy, I performed keyword research and made a list of topics that people were searching for and wrote content on the same.

But, content creation alone doesn’t help in bringing your targeted traffic, no matter how good your content is. Therefore, once I published the content on CashOverflow the next task was Content Distribution which again involved two strategies.

• Link building
• Article Promotion

So, for quality link building, I reached out to hundreds of people in my industry including different media publications and niche websites.

Through this strategy, I was able to publish 100s of articles (guest posting) on these platforms and they gave backlinks to my website. Some of the big names are:

• Entrepreneur.com
• Huffington Post
• YourStory
• Inc42

CashOverflow’s authority increased because the quality of these publications/websites was very high and my content started to rank well in the search results.

That’s how I grew my traffic further.

Along with link building, whenever I published a new article on CashOverflow, I reached out to people on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Email to promote the same extensively.

Lastly, I measured my website’s traffic consistently via Google Analytics and improved my content strategy to optimise for SEO traffic.

I relied heavily on SEO because that was a natural fit to what I was doing on CashOverflow.

What is the biggest roadblock you’ve faced in your blogging career?

I started premium newsletters (weekly insightful email) to help 1000 people in starting & growing an online business. The biggest challenge is making them committed to their own work. People expect the results (money) as soon as they start a website or blog.

To make them committed, I started giving them assignments and asked to fill up their progress in Google form. I removed the members from the Newsletters when they failed to submit their progress continuously for two months.

I have shared the details in this article — My Experience & Learnings of Running paid Email Newsletters for 9 Months (Highly recommended for anyone who is running a content-based online business.)

It worked both ways, I lost a few really good members who could not fill up the forms because of some personal issues, and some who thanked me for pushing them to jump the wall every month.

I stopped enrolling new members into premium newsletters because now I have filtered out a passionate and committed group of about 250 members out of more than 500 people who joined till date. I will keep working with them in the future.

Most people start blogging because they think it’s an easy platform to earn passive income. But only a few of them end up doing this with passion.  What are your thoughts on blogging for money vs blogging for passion?

The first thing is that you should start blogging to learn content marketing. Money will come when you start getting organic traffic on your website.

The second thing is that you should run your blog like a business.

Below are 5 building blocks of any business and I applied the same on my blog.

• A profitable Idea
• Capital (Money from your own pocket or from an investor)
• A Team (You can not execute everything yourself)
• A product that can solve at least one problem of your customer
• Customer who are willing to pay for your product or service

I was able to understand the common pitfalls of business during my failed attempt of startups. I got success on my blogging business by applying the same knowledge.

I suggest new comers to try out things and grow by doing mistakes. You don’t have to worry about technical things because WordPress blogs are very easy to maintain.  

What’s your plan for 2018 and beyond?

I want to run a liberal digital marketing agency (we picked a name UnMarketing Media) where we will keep everything transparent with the team and clients. We will pick only those clients who believe in publishing quality content.

We will not provide traditional marketing services that is focused on hard selling products but we will provide unmarketing services that engage your customers with your content.

The client will be able to see our costs & resources that are going into the project and our team will be able to see the the value distribution in the team. It sounds like Euphoria and it’s difficult to execute without a passionate & honest team. We will go as we find the right people and grow very slowly in the process.   

What’s your favorite marketing book? Can you name a few marketing blogs that helped you in your blogging journey?

I have read a lot of books & blogs on marketing. I published a list of my favorite marketing books on StartupKarma.

I loved Traction and Hooked for startup marketing. Everyone should read a couple of books on human psychology to get better at marketing. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is a must to read book.

My favorite blog list keeps on changing as I learn & grow. In the starting days of my blogging I learned a lot from Buffer, Groove and OkDork blogs.

I recommend Banklinko for SEO and CopyHackers for content writing.

These days, I don’t read blogs but I learn by observing what bloggers and marketers are doing.  

What are your top tips for writing a successful blog post?

I have learned a fraction of writing successful blog posts. My best articles came out when I kept my reader in mind and tried to solve his problems through my content.

That is the first & most important thing in a successful blog post. Later comes the structure, storytelling and flow of the content. Once you learn the art of structure and storytelling then you can easily repurpose your content for creating multiple type of articles by looking at the stats of your website.

Improve the formatting by keeping short sentences and short paragraphs. Add more visuals and data to backup your claims. There should be a mixture of images and videos in your content to have more engaging blog posts.

The post Interview with the Founder of CashOverflow: Pardeep Goyal appeared first on 99signals.

The latest report by State of Inbound says 63% of the marketers worldwide feel that generating traffic and footfalls is the main challenge. We know it well that no single strategy works for all businesses.

Digital marketing has a huge spectrum of activities and that’s where a marketer has his task cut out. To have a blog is just one of the things that drive it out but as important as other marketing activities.

Today, serious businesses and emerging startups don’t have a choice. Nearly 81% of the companies today consider their blog to be ‘useful’, ‘critical’ or ‘important’.  And if they do, then rest assured, it is updated at all days of the week.

Just like any other strategy, starting a blog will not increase your sales manifolds over the night. It takes a little time but you can measure the number of leads you have generated at the end of the year.

It’s even important to assess whether the numbers reflect the true picture of your blog. The rule of the thumb is to continually add quality content and keep the blog articles abreast with what’s hot in the industry.

This infographic below would help you learn more on blog creation and help you decide if you need one in the first place.

The post Do You Need a Blog for Your Business? [Infographic] appeared first on 99signals.

Just check out this research study from Robbie Richards where he reached out to 143 marketing experts to reveal their top 3 favorite SEO tools. Semrush ranked top among SEO tools fetching 63 votes while the second most popular tool (Ahrefs) got 42 votes.

In short, Semrush is the go-to keyword and competitor research tool for a majority of marketers and professional bloggers.

In this article, we’ll examine why it’s such a resourceful tool for bloggers and show you practical tips to get the most out of your Semrush subscription.

If you run a blog and have just started using Semrush or would like to use it to its maximum potential, then this article is for you.

If you haven’t subscribed to Semrush yet, please click on the link below to get free access to Semrush PRO for 30 days.

Get 1-month free access to Semrush Pro (Worth $119.95)

Here are the 5 best Semrush features you should use to improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your blog.

Top 5 Semrush Features for Bloggers

1. Analyze Long Tail Keywords using Keyword Magic Tool

Semrush is primarily known for its Keyword Analytics feature to extract different reports for keyword research.

It works like this:

Just enter your seed keyword(s) into the search box and hit enter. Within a few seconds, Semrush will pull out the following data for the keyword(s):

• Volume of searches
• Number of results
• Phrase match
• Related Keywords
• Competition

But there is another feature within Semrush that’s often ignored by users – The Keyword Magic Tool.

The Keyword Magic Tool is an easy-to-use keyword research tool that provides all the keywords you need to build an effective SEO or PPC campaign. With this tool, you can generate tons of long-tail keywords for your seed keyword(s).

To use this feature, navigate to Keyword Analytics and select Keyword Magic Tool.

Enter your seed keyword(s) and hit ‘Search’. The Keyword Magic Tool will then automatically calculate keyword potential for you, presenting you with data on important metrics such as:

• Volume
• Keyword Difficulty
• CPC
• Competition

In addition to these metrics, Semrush will also present you with a long list of long-tail keywords for the seed keyword(s) which can be exported onto a spreadsheet for manual sorting.

Semrush will show you data on volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competition for each of these keywords, helping you identify the most profitable keywords for your campaign.

Once you have identified the keywords you’d like to include in your campaign, you can add these keywords directly into Keyword Analyzer to get more in-depth information on the keywords.

2. Optimize Your Existing Blog Posts with On Page SEO Checker

The On Page SEO Checker (formerly SEO Ideas) on Semrush is designed to help people optimize their websites for better search rankings. This tool suggests precise optimization ideas to improve the search visibility of web pages on your site based on what your competitors are doing to rank ahead of you.

In this case, you can use On Page SEO Checker to optimize the existing blog posts on your site.

On Page SEO Checker is a project tool, so in order to use this, you’ll need to create a new project for your domain if you haven’t already done so.

Once you’ve done that, go to the projects dashboard to start yourOn Page SEO Checker campaign. In a few seconds, Semrush will generate a report that will list all the optimization ideas Semrush has gathered to improve your website’s SEO.

At the bottom of the report will be your TOP pages to optimize, listed by their combined total volume.

The pages that are targeting the most volume of search will be at the top. To see all of your ideas, click on “View all pages and ideas” at the bottom.

To read your ideas for a specific page, click on one of the green buttons next to that landing page. Semrush will pull out the Optimization Ideas report and suggest improvements to your overall strategy, content, usage of semantically related words (aka LSI keywords), backlinks, technical issues, and user experience.

3. Optimize Your Site’s Technical SEO with Site Audit

As a blogger, the importance of technical SEO shouldn’t be overlooked. To rank high in search result pages, you need to ensure that there are no issues with the technical side of your website.

The Semrush Site Audit feature can help you identify technical SEO issues with your site and highlight steps you’ll need to take to fix these issues.

To run site audit for your site, navigate to Projects and select Site Audit.

The Semrush bot will crawl your website and return with a report on all the on-site errors you need to fix in order to obtain a higher health score. The total health score of the website is based on the ratio of found issues to the number of performed checks.

The technical issues on your site are organized into 3 categories:

• Errors – These are the issues that are of the highest severity and as such, should be fixed immediately. Examples include Broken links (internal and external), duplicate content issues, Robots.txt format errors, sitemap errors, etc.
• Warnings – These issues are of medium severity. Examples include duplicate title and H1 tags, images that don’t contain alt attributes, internal links that contain nofollow attributes, missing meta descriptions, etc.
• Notices – These are minor issues. Examples include external links that contain nofollow attributes, pages blocked from crawling, orphaned pages in sitemaps, etc.

Needless to say, the higher the number of errors on your site, the lower your total health score. Always aim at keeping the health score at 85-90% on a weekly basis.

By running regular site audits, you can monitor your site’s health on a consistent basis and ensure that your search rankings are not affected by technical issues on your site.

4. Monitor Your Brand Outreach using Brand Monitoring Tool

While brand monitoring is done mostly by marketing agencies and PR managers, it is equally important for bloggers to keep a track of any mentions that are positive as this can help you obtain an easy backlink.

The Semrush brand monitoring tool can help you save plenty of time by scanning the web to find online mentions and customer reviews of your blog. You can also monitor the mentions of your blog on Twitter.

Brand Monitoring can be found in the projects section. Go to your projects dashboard and click on the setup button in the Brand Monitoring widget.

Semrush will pull out a report listing all the mentions of your brand. These mentions can be filtered by their source (news feeds, blogs, web) and date, as well as segmented for better navigation with the help of various tags.

Furthermore, you can also use this tool to track the mentions of your competitors’ blogs to unravel new link building opportunities.

We’ll cover link building in detail in the next step.

5. Find New Link Building Opportunities with Link Building Tool

Link building still remains an integral part of SEO and authoritative backlinks from high DA sites can propel your blog post to page 1 in SERPs within no time.

Semrush’s Link Building Tool allows you to determine websites where you can reach out to acquire new potential backlinks and improve your search rankings.

To access Semrush‘s Link Building Tool, go to your projects dashboard and click on the setup button in the Link Building widget.

Next, enter 10 keywords that you wish to earn a higher ranking for and 10 competitors you’d like to outrank in SERPs.

Semrush will then present you with a list of link prospects that could help your overall backlink profile, breaking them down into different sections – prospects based on organic search, competitors’ backlinks, mentions, etc.

Each link in the prospects list can be expanded to see further details by clicking on the dropdown arrow in the Rating column.

When expanded, you will be able to see the domain quality, domain relevance, and domain health of the backlink. Each of these metrics will help you determine if this link will be beneficial to your backlink profile.

To see what each prospect looks like, you can open the link in a new tab using the blue pop out icon next to the URL.

Once you’ve identified what backlink opportunities you want to go after, your link building success comes down to reaching out with your pitch for a backlink. You can connect your GMail account with Semrush so that you can send and monitor outreach emails directly from the interface.

To get even more value out of the Link Building tool, I suggest you integrate your Semrush account with Google Search Console. This will allow you to access additional domain prospects on which you’d like to place a backlink, automatically mark already acquired backlinks, and ensure that your most important backlinks have been indexed by Google.

Over to You

Now that you know the best features and tools within Semrush, it’s time to start optimizing your blog for better search rankings.

If you haven’t used Semrush yet, I hope this post convinced you to at least give it a try. You can even check out my full review of Semrush here to see whether it is the right tool for your requirements.

To take the tool for a free 30-day test drive, click on the link below. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed!

Get 1-month free access to Semrush Pro (Worth $119.95)

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The post 5 Best Semrush Features for Bloggers appeared first on 99signals.