How Long Should a Blog Post Be? What the Data Says

The average blog post is 1,333 words, according to Orbit Media's 2025 survey of 808 bloggers – and Google itself says it has no preferred word count. If you want a working range instead of a single number, the strongest datasets cluster between roughly 1,300 and 2,500 words for a standard post.

Two other numbers frame the decision. Bloggers who write 2,000+ word posts are almost twice as likely to report strong results (39% vs. a 21% benchmark, Orbit Media, 2025). And after a decade of growth, average post length is now shrinking – down about 7% from its 2023 peak. Here is what the data actually supports, stat by stat.

How Long Is the Average Blog Post?

The best year-over-year data on average blog post length comes from Orbit Media's annual blogger survey, which has asked 800-1,100 content marketers the same questions every year since 2014 (12,971 cumulative respondents). The published figures:

The long-running story was “posts keep getting longer” – a 65% increase from 2014 to the 2023 peak. The newer story is the reversal: 1,427 → 1,394 → 1,333 words from 2023 to 2025. That is the first sustained decline in the survey's history, and it coincides with the arrival of AI-assisted drafting – the same surveys show writing time falling over the same period.

Methodology note: these are self-reported figures from a survey that skews toward US, B2B, and LinkedIn-active marketers – treat them as a benchmark for professional blogging, not the entire web.

Does Word Count Affect SEO Rankings?

No – not directly, and this comes from Google itself. Google's helpful content documentation includes the self-assessment question: “Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don't.)” The parenthetical is Google's own.

Google's John Mueller was just as blunt in a 2021 office-hours session: “From our point of view the number of words on a page is not a quality factor, not a ranking factor” (Search Engine Journal, 2021).

So why does everyone cite word counts for SEO? Because of correlation studies. Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million Google search results (2020, updated 2025) found the average top-10 result contains 1,447 words. But the study itself adds the caveat most re-blogs drop: word count was evenly distributed across the top 10, and the authors found “no direct relationship between word count and rankings.”

The likely mechanism is indirect. Longer pages tend to cover more subtopics, match more queries, and earn more links – byproducts of comprehensiveness, not of the word count itself. Padding a 700-word answer to 2,000 words buys you nothing from Google.

Do Longer Posts Get More Backlinks and Shares?

On average, yes – and this is where long-form content earns its reputation. The largest dataset comes from Backlinko and BuzzSumo's analysis of 912 million blog posts (2019):

Note the shape of the share data: shares peak in the 1,000-2,000-word range and show diminishing returns past roughly 2,000 words. Links keep climbing with length; shares do not.

A second dataset triangulates the link finding. Semrush's study of 700,000+ articles (2019) found 3,000+ word articles get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than average-length articles – and that 300-900-word posts end up with zero shares 4.5x more often than long-reads.

One caveat belongs next to every number above: these are correlations. Content Marketing Institute and analyst Josh Bernoff both published critiques of the 912M-post study's causal framing. Ambitious topics get long treatments and attract links; the length itself is not the cause. The 94%-get-zero-links figure is the proof – most long posts get nothing too.

What Length Keeps Readers Engaged?

Reader-behavior data argues for restraint. Medium's product-science team measured total reading time against post length across the platform and found posts with a 7-minute read time capture the most total reading time (Medium Data Lab, 2013). The author's own caveat: the variance is enormous, and great posts win at any length.

You have probably seen this cited as “the ideal blog post is 1,600 words.” That number does not appear in Medium's study – the original measures minutes, not words, and 1,600 is a later conversion by a re-blog at an assumed reading speed. Cite the 7 minutes, not the word count.

The other half of the picture comes from Nielsen Norman Group: on an average visit, users read at most 28% of the words on a page – realistically about 20% (Nielsen, 2008, based on 45,237 instrumented page views). Each additional 100 words earned only about 4.4 seconds of extra attention. Whatever length you choose, most visitors will skim it.

Ideal Blog Post Length by Post Type

The only widely cited type-by-type benchmarks come from HubSpot's analysis of its own 50 most-read posts of 2019 (published 2020, archived – the live post has since been redirected). This is single-site internal data, not an industry study, so read it as “what worked on one very large marketing blog”:

Across all 50 posts, the average was 2,330 words and the median 2,164 – the origin of the often-quoted “2,100-2,400 words for SEO.” But the range ran from 333 to 5,581 words, and a third of the top posts were under 1,500. HubSpot's lead-generating posts ran longer still, averaging 2,569 words.

Orbit Media's 2025 survey adds a format angle from the publisher side: guides and ebooks lead on reported results (27% strong results) while opinion pieces trail (20%) – and how-to articles remain the most-published format, written by 76% of bloggers.

How Long Does It Take to Write a Blog Post?

The average blog post takes 3 hours 25 minutes to write (Orbit Media, 2025). The trend line tells the AI story: 2 hours 24 minutes in 2014, a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022, then 3 hours 48 minutes in 2024 and 3 hours 25 minutes in 2025 – the first multi-year decline in the survey's history, which Orbit links to AI-assisted drafting.

Compare the two curves and a sharper point emerges: writing time fell about 18% from its peak while average length fell only about 7%. Bloggers are getting faster per word, not just writing less.

The time investment correlates with outcomes, too. In the same 2025 survey, bloggers who publish 2,000+ word posts report strong results at nearly twice the benchmark rate (39% vs. 21%) – though only 9% of bloggers actually publish at that length. As with every stat here, that is self-reported and correlational: the marketers willing to invest 4+ hours per post likely differ in more ways than word count.

How Long Should a Blog Post Title Be?

Length matters for titles too, and the data points in two directions at once. For search, Moz recommends keeping title tags to 50-60 characters (~600 pixels) – under 60 characters, about 90% of titles display without truncation in Google. As with body word count, this is a display limit, not a ranking rule: John Mueller has confirmed there is no title-length ranking factor (Search Engine Journal, 2021).

For social distribution, longer wins: 14-17-word headlines earned 76.7% more social shares than short ones, and question headlines earned 23.3% more shares than non-questions (Backlinko × BuzzSumo, 2019). Semrush's 700K-article study (2019) agrees: 14+-word headlines drew 2x more traffic and 5x more backlinks than 7-10-word ones.

That is a real tension – the headline length that wins shares gets truncated in search results – so title strategy depends on the channel. What does not change across channels is capitalization: a headline in clean title case reads as edited, and the rules for which words stay lowercase depend on your style guide. If you write news-style headlines, start with the AP capitalization rules.

Sources

1. 12th Annual Blogger Survey (n=808) — Orbit Media Studios, 2025
2. We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts — Backlinko × BuzzSumo, 2019
3. We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results — Backlinko, 2020
4. Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content — Google Search Central, 2026
5. Google: Word Count Is Not a Quality Factor (Mueller quote) — Search Engine Journal, 2021
6. Google on Title Tag Length (Mueller quote) — Search Engine Journal, 2021
7. The Optimal Post Is 7 Minutes — Medium Data Lab (Mike Sall), 2013
8. How Little Do Users Read? — Nielsen Norman Group, 2008
9. The Anatomy of Top Performing Articles (700K+ articles) — Semrush, 2019
10. How Long Should Blog Posts Be in 2021? (archived) — HubSpot, 2020
11. Title Tag Guidelines — Moz, n.d.
12. Could a Study About 912 Million Blog Posts Be Wrong? — Content Marketing Institute, 2019
13. Correlation, Causation, and Confusion: The Backlinko Study — Josh Bernoff, 2019

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