Clients often ask us what can they do to “get better results on Google?“… and one of our recommendations is blogging. It’s a fairly easy tick in the box of updating some content on your website, which search engines like Google want to see. Question two usually follows – “but how long does it need to be?“… how long is a piece of string?
We always say – blogging isn’t like writing an A-Level English essay. So, get rid of that idea first of all and step back a little. If you go through our blogs, you’ll see a lot about being open, honest, transparent, authoritative and more. Blogging is your ideal chance to be just all of those things – think of it as a way to get across your business ideals and message to your clients, and potential clients.
A good rule of thumb is 300-500 words for a blog post, but at the end of the day there has to be quality content that is useful to your clients/visitors. Your visitors want to feel as if they have learned something from spending the time reading your post, it’s a chance to educate them and also show that you know your stuff. If your post ends up being over 1000 words then no problem, so long as your visitors have learned what they came there to learn and you’re not waffling. Worry less about the word count, more about the quality content.
How can you check how well your blog post is doing in terms of pleasing customers? Well, a great tool on Google analytics is the bounce rate. You can check the bounce rate for each page/post and see if your content is hitting the mark or not. If the bounce rate is high (say over 45%) then you know that visitors are landing on the page and leaving almost straight away, because the focus of the post isn’t clear, or the answer isn’t there straight away.