How long should a blog post be?

Last updated on 3 August 2026

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Whether I’m chatting to people on Threads, someone has replied to my email or my Instagram story, or they’re posting a question into The Blogging Room community … people are forever asking me ‘how long should a blog post be?’

And my answer is not one they’re going to like: as long as it needs to be.

Which seems like a complete cop-out answer; I do realise that, but I want to bring it down for you a little bit so you understand why that’s my stance.

Quick history of search and blog post length (through my eyes)

Early days of blogging

In the early days of blogging (I’m talking 2000s really, when it started to take off a bit more, even though it’s been around for decades before that), it was very easy to get views on your blog posts.

You’d write whatever it is you were writing, probably without any SEO in mind and likely just sharing what was going on in your life at the time, and somehow people would find it.

It could be really long, or it could be really short. It didn’t really matter as much.

SEO comes in

And then people caught on to SEO (search engine optimisation) a bit more, but how search engines found your content and recommended you was different. You could write a recipe post about carrot cake, and mention ‘carrot cake’ and ‘carrot cake recipe’ and any other variation of this a bunch of times, and you’d rank.

The more keywords stuffed in there, the better. Which meant that longer blog posts did really well – more opporunity to get more keywords in there.

Changes to search and volume

I think the real changes came around the 2010s, and I’m not saying that everything before that was the right or wrong way. I’m just pointing out it was different.

In the 2010s, search engines like Google started to change how they were showing content to people, which means you really want to create super detailed, long posts that were multiple thousands of words long. You’d talk about every single possible thing you could in that blog post, and you’d be using all your keywords still, but they’d be less obviously stuffed in there.

It’s true that some of my most popular blog posts back then (and to be fair, to this day) are really long and detailed blog posts.

But then things changed again.

Search intent over keywords

It’s always been the case that you should be writing for people and your readers and not just an algorithm or search engine. There has always needed to be that balance between the two.

But in the 2020s, I really think that search intent has become more important than getting the perfect keyword. Yes, they’re still really good to have, and they are important, too, but if the search intent isn’t right for the person, then even if they find your blog post because of a keyword, if the post isn’t for them, they’re going to click away.

With this subtle change comes the need to change up how long a blog post should be.

Wait, so how long should a blog post be?

A blog post should be however long it needs to be.

Hear me out for a moment.

If your blog post is called something like ‘The Ultimate Guide to [thing]’, then your readers are going to be looking for a blog post that is so detailed and covers absolutely everything they need to know about the topic.

That means that your blog post should probably be several thousand words long. It’s inevitable that talking about as many things as you can on the topic (and thus making it an ‘ultimate guide’) is going to result in a long blog post.

They’d be thoroughly put out if they arrived on a blog post expecting to learn everything about making cheese at home, only to discover it’s a 300-word spiel about how you made cheese that one time … by accident. In the garage. At your in-laws’ house. They were not pleased.

But if your readers were looking for a quick answer to a question that they had – what’s the best milk to use to make the cheese? or where to get the right equipment for cheese making – then that blog post is going to be a lot shorter. Perhaps just a couple hundred words.

And therein lies my point: A blog post should be as long as you think it needs to be to answer the question or address the query.

If that means you write a 7,000-word blog post outlining everything you know about Contiki, so be it. If that means you write just 500 words about a book that you did or did not love, so be it.

There is no right or wrong answer. There is no ‘must be 1000 words long’ anymore.

Write what you need to write, and then stop.

That’s how long a blog post should be.