18 stats to help you write the perfect blog post

... sounds like a big claim... but these 18 stats will shed light on how to get your blog posts more social shares and therefore back links (which are so important to help you rank well in Google). In this post we'll look at five easily measurable factors and show how they can be used to make your blogging a success.

Article length

These few stats will help you answer questions like: how long is the optimum length of a blog post? And does the length of your content matter?

1. Articles that are over 1,500 words long receive on average 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes... read more.

2. Longer content can convert up to 45% better... read more.

3. The average content length for a Google top ten ranking is 2,000 words or more... read more.

 

(With all of this said, we’re not giving you an excuse to ramble! If your post is naturally long then great but don't waffle just to make your content longer.)

Blog headlines

The headline is your mini sales pitch to get people to click through to your blog, it's your moment to shine. So what works best?

4. 77% of press releases indexed in Google news had headlines that were too long, and so appeared truncated... read more. So make sure when you're writing to keep your headlines under 65 characters long.

5. More than 1 in 4 of all headlines won’t fit into a tweet! ... read more. This is another reason to follow the 65 character golden rule.

6. The blog title length sweet spot is between 14 and 16 words long with up to 5 times more back links than a title with 24 words... read more.

Blog articles with lists

List blog posts are everywhere. Have they been overdone? Maybe… but the stats show that there are a few compelling reasons for their popularity:

7. A study by SEOMoz showed that blog articles using lists receive twice as many back links... read more.

8. 22 out of 25 of Econsultancy’s top 25 blog posts of 2013 were lists blog posts... read more.

Blog articles with images

 

The average number of  images per blog post is 3.2 per post but are there any benefits to be gained by adding images?

9. 40% of us are visual learners, we’ll respond better to visuals than plain text... read more.

10. Articles with images get 94% more views... read more.

11. Photos are linked to twice as much as text updates... read more.

12. Infographics can help businesses grow traffic by 12% more than those who don’t use them... read more.

Blog articles with videos

We would all (well most of us) probably guess that well produced videos would have a positive affect on our website... but producing video content does take a lot of effort, so is it worth it?

13. Pages with videos are 50 times more likely to appear in Google search results... read more.

14. Visitors spend twice as long on pages with video content... read more.

15. The percentage of people who will click on a video in Google search results is 41% higher than for normal search results... read more.

16. 700+ videos are shared on Twitter every minute... read more.

17. 76% of YouTube users tell someone about a video they have seen... read more.

18. 75% of executives says that they watch more than one work related video a week... read more.

To round things off, SEOMoz gave us this stat: blog posts with videos, images and lists attract up to 6 times more back links than a plain post. We're talking to ourselves just as much as anyone else with this post... we'll be adding more videos in future!


We hope this blog post has given you a few easily actionable tips to get your blog articles more visibility, more back links and more social shares.