Hi, and welcome back to the simple SEO podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Lynn Teigen. And I'm so glad to have you here with me today. Today, we're going to talk about how long should your blog post be for SEO? So if you are creating content on a regular basis, you're blogging or you have a YouTube show or a podcast video, or a podcast, and you are creating blog posts to go along with your content to showcase it, to help you get more traffic from Google. You're very likely wondering how long does this need to be? How many words do I need to include? You may even be wondering, can I have chat GPT, write it for me. Um, no. Let's not have chat GPT, write it for you. We're not going to get the quality that we need. Let's just say that right now. But how long should it be? So, this is one of those questions where the answer is not black and white. The answer is it should be as long as it needs to be. And that's really ambiguous and difficult and not super helpful. Huh? You probably would, rather I tell you it should be 500 words. It should be seven 50. It should be 2000 though. If I say it should be 2000 words, you're probably thinking. Uh, no, Rachel, I'm not doing that. So the reason I say it should be as long as it needs to be. As, because Google really wants you to focus on your reader. What information do they need? What should you include in it? The other thing I want you to think about and look at is what is the competition sharing on that subject? Because the reality is you're not going to be the only person writing a blog post on whatever subject you're writing on, because most of us are not in underserved markets. Most of us have competition and having competition is not a bad thing. Having competition tells us. There was a market for our product, our service, our niche, et cetera. So what you can do when you're trying to figure out how long should your blog post be? How many words do you need? What I want you to start with is go to Google using an incognito browser window. Remember, that's the really important part because that's where. We get the information that doesn't have our personalized results. So what we see is more like what someone else would see when searching for keywords related to our business. So I want you to go. Once you've identified kind of what you should be writing on. You found a keyword idea. Go and put that keyword into Google, using the incognito browser window and take a look and see. Who's ranking on page one. Now who's ranking at the top of page one. You've already identified that this is a good keyword. You have a really good chance of ranking for it. So that part we don't have to worry about, but what we're looking at is what type content does Google think is a good result for that? Keyword? Are these short blog posts? Are they long blog posts? Do they have video in them? Do they have audio in them? Do they have lots of graphics? Do they maybe have an infographic? Is it a listicle like what type content is it? And approximately how long it is. Now, I don't want you to copy them because that's not the point. We're not going to rank high. If all we're doing is copying them, but we want to have an idea what's ranking because. If what's ranking is a 1500 word blog post. And we write something with 300 words. It's very unlikely that Google is going to think that our. 300 word blog post. Is more helpful and provides more value than a 1500 word blog post. That is probably going much more in depth than ours is. So you do want to look at that and think about it and be very realistic there. Now what you can do. If you're trying to figure out what to cover in it, you can always go to chat GPT or Claude. I personally prefer clot. I've played around with several of them. I feel like Claude works a little bit better from a content perspective, but you can go to an AI tool and you can give it the keyword Intel. Like who your ideal customer is, who your audience is, what you want to write about. This is the blog post title, and you helped me outline it and it can help you outline the blog post, and it can give you ideas for what you should include in it. You can even have it, give you a rough draft of it, if you really aren't sure what to say now, I don't want you to copy paste anything out of AI onto your website, because you're not going to rank with it, but it can help get you started, which can speed up the process. Another thing you can do. Is to. Put your competitors blog post into your AI tool. And ask Google. To use that as an input. So this is the article. This is the competitor. What else could I put into my article to hopefully beat this article? And you can ask Google and Google can give you suggestions for additional content or additional. Here's another good one semantically related keywords. Like what other semantically related information or semantically related keywords could I add here that can help you as well? So the reality is. The length of your blog post is going to depend on the competition in your market and the competition for that keyword. If everybody who's ranking at the top of page one, Has super long. Blog posts. You're probably not going to outrank them with a super short one. If they all have video in their posts, then you probably need to have video because Google is. Ranking those because they are a good user experience. People who are going to those pages. Are liking what they're seeing. They're watching the videos. They're engaging with the content. They're listening to the audio clips, et cetera. So, if you're trying to break into the top 10, then looking at that information is going to be helpful. So how long is your post? It depends. And I know that's probably not the answer that you wanted, but I want you to take a very. Um, I want you to take a very strategic approach in creating your content this year, because the more strategic we can be. The better results we're going to get. So I don't ever want you to jump you. Come in and say, we're going to write a 500 word blog post because when we write to a specific word count, It's not very good because we're more focused on the word count, then the value and helping our ideal customer being, providing helpful content, all of that and helpful content is a big part of what Google is looking for from our content perspective. They're also grading us based on double E T, which is experience expertise, authority, and trust. So make sure when you are creating your blog posts, you are highlighting your experience, your expertise, your authority, and trustworthiness. Now authority and trustworthy are. Be something you can show a little bit in your blog posts, but they're also going to be signals that Google gets from other websites. And they're really looking at like the sentiment around your brand in general. Is it positive? Is it negative? They want to see that you have a brand across different channels. So Google's looking at all of that. So when you're writing a blog post, the answer is. There's no perfect keyword or there's no perfect number of words for your blog post for SEO, you need to look and see what the competition is doing. What, how long their posts are, what type. Additional media, they're putting into the posts and you need to create something that will hopefully outrank those. I hope that helps. If you have any questions, you can DM me on Instagram or you can submit the Google doc that's in here that has the link is in the show notes, the description on the podcast episode. Um, I go through all of that when I'm planning my content and I use your questions for podcast episodes. You can also. Text the show through Buzzsprout now. I can't respond back to the texts, but I read them and I use them to help. To come up with topics and help teach on things that I know you're interested in learning. All right, that's it for today? Have a great one. Bye for now.