- Having a blog is a wonderful way to enhance your marketing efforts, but you need to be smart with your approach.
- Long-form content has been shown to get an average of 77.2% more links than short posts.
- Headlines between 14-17 words in length are the best performers when it comes to social shares.
- Companies with 16 or more posts per month see about 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than companies with 4 or fewer posts.
- Adding images, video, or audio to a blog post can have a big impact on its performance.
Blogging seems basic enough. You just sit in front of a computer and unload anything that comes to mind regarding your intended topic… right? While that certainly might make for some entertaining posts, if you’re using a blog for marketing purposes, there’s a lot more to consider.
Having a blog is a wonderful way to enhance your marketing efforts, but you need to be smart with your SEO for blogs. There are more than four million blog posts written every day and Google can be a finicky ally. You definitely want to know what the search engines like and play to that format.
So, if you’re poised to write your first post or just want to polish up your skills before the next writing session, we have the statistics to help you.
No Matter What They Tell You, Size Does Matter
Sorry to disappoint folks. While short, snappy posts can be fun to read and are definitely less labor intensive to write, they just don’t get the search engine love that long form content gets. In fact, long form content has been shown to get an average of 77.2% more links than short posts.
How long is too long? Well, it would seem that there can be too much of a good thing in content marketing. Performance starts to dwindle for posts longer than 2000 words. Top ranked posts in Google are between 1140 and 1285 words. Anything in the 200 word range is seen by Google as thin and should be avoided.
Think About The Competition
These days practically everyone doing content marketing knows about keywords and that they need to use them in SEO for blogs. That said, you must be aware of how competitive the keywords you’ve chosen are and how that relates to short form and long form content.
If you’re using keywords with little to no competition, then writing a 1000 word post should be sufficient. With higher competition keywords the word count should be in the 2200 to 2500 range to maximize performance.
Limit Your Links
While Google doesn’t specifically state the ideal number of internal links to include in a post, there is such a thing as overdoing it. A good rule of thumb is to stick with around 3 or 4 internal links per post, depending on your word count.
As far as external links go, it’s best to stick with the amount needed to improve the clarity of the post; links should not be forced in, but only included to add extra information. Too many look spammy and bring down the quality of your content marketing efforts.
Backlinks Don’t Boost Your Shareability
While having backlinks in your posts can bump up your organic search ranking, they’ve been found to have next to no influence on shares. If you’re looking to create a highly shareable post, don’t look to backlinks to get you there.
Short Headlines Are Not So Sweet
In some instances it’s beneficial to be brief and to the point. However, with blog post headlines, long lines reign supreme. It’s been found that headlines between 14 and 17 words in length are the best performers when it comes to social shares, getting 76.6% more social shares than their shorter counterparts.
Any Day Is A Good Day To Post
There are days of the week that are better for getting deals at the mall and times of the year that are better for buying a car, but any day is a good day for content marketing. New blog posts are published all the time and it seems that they all get an equal amount of the social sharing pie. If anything, consistency is key, so if you publish one post every Wednesday that’s better than publishing posts all over the map.
More Posts, More Traffic
Sometimes it’s tough to get a post up on the blog, but posting more regularly can have dramatic results as far as traffic is concerned. If you increase your posts by 100% your traffic should see about a 300% boost. 60% of bloggers who add posts on a daily basis report seeing very healthy results. Companies with 16 or more posts per month see about 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than companies with 4 or fewer posts.
Lists Are King In Social Sharing
If you’re looking to bump up your SEO for blogs and want to include a little something extra, look to lists. Infographics can be eye-catching and ‘how tos’ are informative, but lists are what gets shared the most. In fact, a list post gets shared, on average, 218% more than a ‘how to’ post and 203% more than a post with infographics.
Certain Formats Are More Link-Friendly
When you’re new to the world of SEO for blogs it’s easy to assume that any type of post has the same opportunity to gain links. The truth is that certain content marketing formats work best for getting backlinks. Posts with infographics or ones that tell you ‘why’ or ‘what’ have a 25.8% advantage over posts with videos or ones that explain ‘how to’.
A Picture’s Worth A Thousand Words… Or Views
Adding images, video, or audio to a blog post can have a big impact on its performance. 54% of successful posts have one or more media components. Posts that contain media get 94% more views than those without and posts that include an image every 75 to 100 words get shared twice as often ones that have fewer images. Including visuals with color boosts the likelihood of people reading a post by 80%.
Of course, there are no hard and fast rules in content marketing; what works for one business may not be the ideal fit for the next. If your head is swimming with all the stats and you need some further assistance, not to worry. Our marketing experts lives for these kinds of nerdy numbers and can get your blog SEO ready in no time.
