Stats are good. They bring you face to face with the reality. They put numbers on conjectures and turn them into facts. Orbit Media conducts a survey among 1000+ bloggers every year and publishes the findings.
Although there are multiple findings in the blogging survey of 2021, there are some findings I find more interesting than the others. Anyway, I don’t want to turn it into a big blog post, so here are some good stats to ponder over:
On an average it takes 4 hours to write a decent blog post
An average blog post takes 4 hours to write.
Yes, I know my clients are going to balk at these figures. Up till couple of years ago, with great difficulty I was charging them for one hour for a blog post. Now, somehow I have been able to convince them that it takes a little less than two hours to write a decent blog post of 1000 words. This includes researching, finding the right information, writing, and then revising. Sometimes, revising multiple times.
Personally, my number would be around 2-3 hours, if I write uninterrupted, without distractions.
An average blog post is of 1400+ words
An average blog post is of 1400 words.
The blog posts that I write for my client, these days are around 1000-1500 words. Hence, sort of, the same average.
Why has the number of words increased over the years? In the above figure, in 2014, the average number of words in a blog post were 808. Ever since then, the number has been rising.
Google regularly insists that the longer the blog post, the better are its chances of getting ranked higher. An average client knows this. Almost all the clients who contact me know that their blog post must be at least 1000 words, and if they want to be more competitive, they want to keep it around 2000 words.
The level of awareness vis-à-vis quality content is rising. A greater number of clients are realizing that to beat competition, they need well-written blog posts. They also know that the number of words matter. Very few clients want to publish thin content these days.
The maximum number of bloggers want to publish 500-1500 words.
I have seen the middle of a trend among my clients. In 2021, so far there has been just one client who wanted 3000+ words for blog posts. Most want 1000 words. 2000-word blog post requests are gradually rising. Just today I wrote a 2000+ words blog post for a finance company.
What should be the publishing frequency?
To the clients who can afford, I always recommend one blog post every day, at least in the beginning when they want to provide, or they should be providing, lots of content to Google to crawl and index.
Greater blogging frequency gets better results.
Greater blogging frequency gives you a cumulative result. Again, if you give Google more content, it is going to crawl and index more content, and the probability of your content appearing in the search results naturally increases (I’m assuming that we are talking about relevant, quality content, and not just spammy, meaningless content).
Google also sets a crawling schedule. It matters how fast your content is crawled and indexed. If there is no crawling schedule, it may take weeks, sometimes even months for your individual blog posts to get crawled. But if you publish regularly, Google begins to take note of it and begins to crawl your website or your blog with greater frequency, getting your first exposure in the search results.
How many bloggers research keywords?
Researching keywords before writing a blog post
I would like to approach this topic from two angles: my own, and that of my clients.
I research keywords only when I intent to target certain keywords, while writing for my own blog. The topic takes precedence. I’m not saying I’m not sensitive towards researching keywords, when my priority is to unleash a blog post as quickly as possible as I’m working on other assignments, there is little time for elaborate keyword research.
For my clients, yes, sometimes when they ask, I do some quick research. I have been writing content for so many years, and for so many industries, that I have a basic knack for preparing a quick list of the most relevant keywords whenever a client sends me a topic.
I don’t make my own suggestions because, to be frank, I’m not being paid for that. I’m being paid for writing. Only when clients hire me for my content consulting services that I talk about keyword research.
Naturally, bloggers who do keyword research get better results.
Keyword research gives better results.
Do bloggers update their old posts?
Updating old blog posts.
I have been doing that for some time now. When I’m going through my old blog posts to re-purpose some portion of the content, I often realize that I could have written those blog posts better, used more information, could have done better formatting, and so on.
In terms of clients getting their old blog posts updated, I think it is too much to expect, especially when even for the first time, they’re watching every penny they spend. Makes sense. Repeatedly updating older blog posts could be viable only when you’re either publishing your own blog or you have a content writer constantly working with you.
For example, for me it is just a matter of clicking the edit button and quickly making the changes.
There are some more stats and figures, and also graphs, that you can go through in the original Orbit Media link that I have shared above.