Prescribing the ideal word count

How long should an article be to ensure maximum readership and engagement, and how many words does it take before eyes glaze and readers keel over? The ideal word count question is one that marketing professionals (and journalists) wrestle with all the time.

The bad news is there is no magic number, and several factors need to be considered to gauge the ideal length of an article – such as the intended audience, subject matter and the ultimate objective. But we’ve pulled together some data to help marketers address this issue and navigate the constantly shifting online content ecosystem.

If the aim is to provoke a discussion, snappy posts of 300 words or less are ideal, according to this guide. But, if readers are to be encouraged to share a post widely, it needs to be longer - between 1,000 to 1,500 words. Word counts between 300 to 750 are deemed to be a workable compromise for garnering a respectable number of online shares with some engagement. To maximise shares across platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, some estimates show that articles ranging from 3,000 words to as much as 10,000 fare best.

This post compiles figures from several sources to propose subject-specific word counts that do justice to the topic at hand while helping with social media shares and high page rankings.

Articles on finance are estimated to require between 2,100 to 2,500 words while technology-focused write-ups are best limited to around 1,000 words. The ideal length for posts on real estate is deemed to be between 1,800 and 1,900 words while marketing or advertising-related articles work well when they are close to 3,000.

Thought leadership content on healthcare, which tends to require breaking down complicated scientific concepts and findings for a broader audience, is expected to top out at around 2,150 words. Meanwhile, another study, which looked at the average length of the webpages on some of the world’s most-visited hospital websites, came up with a SEO-friendly count in the range of 700-800 words.

Some research focuses on the time readers are most likely to spend on a given article, which according to one estimate works out to seven minutes. Which brings us to the question of why longer pieces seem to be in vogue at a time when fewer people are reading articles in their entirety. This could be due to the frequently changing search engine algorithms at Google, which tends to have an outsized influence on what users see when they search for online content.

Past research has shown that lengthier articles ranked higher on Google’s search results, with the average length of content that showed up on the first page of Google’s search results pegged at 1,447 words. These metrics make a significant difference in a world where search engine algorithms determine the content presented to readers and how they consume it. How many of us click through to the second page of results after typing in a search word or phrase?

Getting the word count right is crucial. That part is not up for debate but it’s also true that quality usually trumps quantity. If an article is unreadable its length becomes moot. It’s best to get the content right before worrying about hitting that magic number.