Heard a content strategist at a local meetup say shorter blogs are a waste of time

I went to this small content meetup in Austin last month, maybe 15 people in a back room of a coffee shop. There was this guy who works for a big SaaS company, and he said anything under 2,000 words is basically worthless for SEO. He was pretty adamant about it. But my own experience running a blog for my pest control business tells me different. I put up a 600 word post about how to spot termite droppings, and it drives like 80% of my site traffic. Longer stuff I wrote got buried. So now I am second guessing my whole approach. Is he right and I just got lucky, or are short posts still a viable strategy for local businesses? Has anyone else seen good results with shorter content?

3 comments

3 Comments

nora_dixon4d ago

Funny you mention that meetup, because it reminds me of a time I went to a gardening workshop last spring. The instructor spent a whole hour telling us everyone needs raised beds for good tomatoes. Then I go home and my neighbor who just throws seeds in bare dirt has the biggest tomatoes on the block. That guy seems like he was talking from a big company perspective where you need volume to rank nationally. For a local pest control business, your customers are probably searching for very specific problems like finding termite droppings, not broad topics. A short, direct answer to their exact question is gold. Short posts work fine when you know what your local customers are actually typing into Google.

ryanh563d ago

Short, direct answer to their exact question is gold" is exactly right. Short posts can crush it for local searches.

kelly_nelson953d ago

Last month I helped a friend with his local HVAC site and we cut his blog posts from 1500 words down to 300. We saw a 40 percent jump in calls from people searching "furnace makes clicking noise." That just proves you don't need a whole novel to rank when you match exactly what someone types in.