When it comes to content, character counts! Character length that is. Every platform and piece of content has its own rules for ideal or required length. But, it's hard to remember all of them, especially when they make a change (ahem... I'm looking at you, Twitter). But, our favorite marketing platform, Hubspot, just published a little guide to character length by content and by channel to make it super easy to remember!
1) Blog Posts
Post length: 2100 words
Title: Under 60 characters
Meta Description: Under 155 charactersPost BodyWhen it comes to the length of blog posts, there are a few different items to consider. For example:
- According to Medium, posts with an average read time of seven minutes captured the most attention.
- The average reading speed of native English-speaking adults remains commonly cited as 300 words per minute, according to research conducted in 1990.
- At that reading rate, the ideal post length is 2100 words.
- That aligns with research previously conducted by serpIQ, which indicated that, on average, the top 10 results for most Google searches are between 2,032 and 2,416 words.
That means that this ideal word count can address goals around both readability and SEO. But that's just the actual body of the post. Plus, when we looked at our own blog on organic traffic, we found that the sweet spot was 2,250–2,500 words.
Title
The length of your title depends on your goals, and where it will appear.Let's start with SEO. Do you want this post to rank really well in search? It turns out, that often has to do with the dimensions of each entry on a search engine results page (SERP). For Google, titles of search results are usually contained at a length of 600 pixels -- which Moz measures as being able to display the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. So, if you don't want your title to get cut off in the search results, it might be best to keep it under 60 characters. But when in doubt, you can double-check the length of your meta description and title tags with this handy tool from SEOmofo, or you can use Moz's title tag preview tool.
Read the rest of the guide here (and you should probably just bookmark it for easy finding!)
If measuring your messages for optimum length doesn't sound like your thing, maybe you should bring in a professional. At Front Burner Marketing, we keep up to date on all the latest content news and we firmly believe that character counts! Let us help you craft engaging content sized just right for your market and your social media channels.
If you want to get a better picture of what your website might be missing, check out our eBook 25 Website Must Haves by clicking below.
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