Your published content is your business’ ambassador to the world. The way a company communicates — whether through a blog, a brochure, or a website — shapes how customers perceive its brand. Yet, many businesses struggle to create compelling content that connects with their audience and drives valuable action. Most of these are likely lacking one thing in common — a dedicated business content writer.
Recent content marketing data illustrates a growing demand for professional writing expertise in various forms of business content. Companies publishing 16 or more blog posts per month generate 4.5 times more leads than those publishing fewer than four. Moreover, long-form content — typically between 1,500 and 2,500 words — consistently ranks higher on Google than shorter pieces. However, if you’re currently getting your business content out by asking team members to wear a writer’s hat a few hours a week, these are challenging hurdles to clear.
But dedicated business writers don’t just churn out words to a requested volume — they craft messages tailored to engage, inform, and persuade. They make your content feel authentic to the audience you actually want to reach in a format representative of what your brand stands for.
Having a professional business writer behind your content is an investment in your company’s growth. In today’s saturated content market, someone who can translate your vision into effective, targeted messaging will help your business stand out against a drab background of generic fluff.
Why Businesses Need Content Writers
If you’re unconvinced your business would benefit from a personal business writer, consider the following details.
1. Challenges of Creating High-Quality Content
The publishing pace and length of competitive business content can easily become a grueling death march for many small to medium-sized businesses. Without a dedicated resource, content creation typically becomes a side task for employees juggling other responsibilities. And the result is often rushed or inconsistent messaging. In their own words, 84% of B2B businesses report that creating quality content at scale is a significant persistent challenge. Over time, these gaps and inconsistencies hurt branding efforts and cause missed opportunities to connect with potential customers.
2. Business Writers Elevate Branding
A professional business writer focused exclusively on crafting compelling, consistent content will help you define and refine your unique brand. By aligning all written materials — blog posts, website copy, white papers, and social media updates — on a common axis of intention, a business writer ensures your customers know what to expect from your brand. In today’s information-saturated market, consistent branding is indispensable for success, as 60% of B2B buyers say well-written, informative content across media types significantly influences their purchasing decisions. Beyond messaging, a skilled writer will also adapt content to different platforms and mediums, helping you communicate your message in the most engaging manner for each context.
3. The Importance of Professional Communication
Clear and professional communication establishes trust and credibility. Conversely, sloppy or poorly written content will likely make your customers wonder what other important details you skimp on or ignore altogether.
In today’s world where almost nothing is written without at least the assistance of auto-correction, the potential pitfalls of poorly written content include far more than just trivial typos or an occasional errant apostrophe. You won’t strike your customers as professional and authoritative if your content contains inaccurate technical terminology. Nor will you seem casual and warm if your writing is stilted and dry. Regardless of the image you wish to project, there are many more potential mismatches of medium and message than there are glove-like fits.
Types of Projects a Personal Business Writer Can Handle
A dedicated business writer can do more for you than just write blogs. Important content projects you can hand off to your writer include the following content types.
1. Website Content
Many of your potential customers get their first impressions of your business from your website. And they do so with alarming haste. Studies have shown users begin to form positive or negative first impressions of websites in less than half a second and most will navigate away from pages in just five seconds if they don’t like what they see and read.
As such, homepages and service pages need clear, engaging — and search-engine-optimized — language to capture attention and communicate effectively. A dedicated business writer ensures the tone and style align with your brand while delivering content that drives visitors to take action, such as making inquiries or purchases.
2. Blog Posts and Articles for Thought Leadership
Regularly publishing high-quality blogs and articles is one of the most reliable ways to establish authority in your industry. A professional writer crafts informative, well-researched content that resonates with your audience and boosts your search engine rankings. Thought leadership articles help build trust by addressing customer pain points, offering solutions, and positioning your business as a go-to resource.
3. Marketing Materials: Brochures, Emails, and Sales Pages
Marketing materials play an important role in acquiring and retaining customers. Brochures, email campaigns, and sales pages require a compelling copy to convey your unique value proposition. A skilled writer will know how to balance persuasive language with professionalism, giving you diverse materials to drive conversions and develop customer loyalty.
4. Social Media Content and Campaign Strategy
Social media demands concise, attention-grabbing content tailored to the highly specific user preferences of each platform. You can give your business writer a single message or concept and they can tweak the core content to match the highest performing length, formatting, style, and tone of different social media. With professional writing, your social media presence becomes a powerful tool for increasing visibility and interaction.
5. Internal Documentation
Clear, well-written internal documents enable effective communication within your organization. Policies, employee handbooks, and training manuals created by a business writer ensure that employees understand expectations and procedures, reducing confusion and keeping everyone on the same page.
6. Whitepapers, Press Releases, and Reports
Whitepapers, press releases, and reports require meticulous research and a polished presentation. A dedicated writer will deliver documents with both subject-matter expertise and compelling presentation.
Why a Human Content Writer Outshines AI for Businesses
While AI tools offer businesses a free, scalable means of generating enough content, they lack the nuanced understanding and creative depth professional human content writers bring to the table. If you want to connect authentically with your audience, you’ll have more success speaking with an inimitably human voice.
Human writers understand context and tone, allowing them to craft content to suit your company’s brand voice and target audience. AI often generates generic text that may misinterpret subtle cultural or emotional cues, resulting in a disconnect between what you want to say and what your audience hears.
Professional writers excel in crafting original, engaging content that resonates with readers. Generative AI systems rely on pre-existing data and algorithms, inadvertently churning out repetitive or unoriginal content. In a marketspace where nearly everyone uses the same tools governed by the same algorithms, addressing your audience with an unmistakably human voice allows you to differentiate your business from a static background.
Lastly, it’s worth remembering that while human writers will inevitably make some very characteristically human mistakes, they’re at least far less likely to go off the rails entirely citing facts that aren’t facts from fictional studies. There’s little doubt that AI developers will eventually work out most of the kinks of hallucinations in generative large language models (LLMs). In the meantime, the amount of oversight needed to filter fabrications out of AI-generated texts pretty much offsets the benefits of using them in the first place.
So, if your interest is piqued, reach out and let one of our diverse personal business writers craft some authority content for your business.
Would you let the receptionist at your doctor’s office diagnose your illness? Probably not.
Then why would you hire a generalist writer to cover niche content?
It can be tempting to let your business slide by with generic website content as long as you’re ranking in search engines. But to truly turn those clicks into conversions, you need to stand out from the generic competition.
You need a niche writer.
What Is a Niche Writer?
A niche writer specializes in creating content for a specific industry or topic. Cruise travel writers and engineering technical writers are two examples. Unlike content generalists, niche writers deeply understand industry terminology, trends, challenges, and customer needs.
For instance, a legal writer will understand compliance standards and legal jargon, while a medical writer will know how to create accurate and empathetic content for healthcare providers and patients. This level of expertise ensures that the content resonates with its intended audience, builds trust, and positions your brand as a thought leader.
In today’s AI-focused world, having a niche writer on your team is necessary. Generic content often gets lost in the noise, but in-depth, industry-specific content written by experts can set you apart.
Why Hire a Niche Writer?
You may have heard the term “jack of all trades, master of none.” A content generalist is sort of like this. They may have writing talent and SEO skills but lack the depth of knowledge required to serve your customers’ specific needs. Expert writers not only provide accurate and relevant content but also inspire customers’ trust and loyalty through increased brand authority.
Niche writers offer benefits you can take to the bank. One business even saw a 300% increase in organic revenue by adding expert content to their website.
Here are a few reasons why using a niche writer can be a total game-changer for your business.
Earn Customer Trust and Loyalty with Topical Authority
Your customers are smart. They know the difference between surface-level content and truly insightful information. And they’re more likely to trust and stay loyal to a company that provides the expert knowledge they need.
An Edelman Trust Barometer special report found that consumer trust drives business growth more than ever. Over half of consumers surveyed proclaimed their loyalty (and their money) to brands they trust.
By investing in a niche writer, you show your audience that you understand their needs, pain points, and goals — and that they can trust you as an industry authority.
Grow Your Customer Base with Higher Rankings
A website with in-depth, well-researched coverage of a topic will land higher on a search engine results page than one with a few superficial articles. This is partially thanks to topical authority — a measure of how well your content is valued within its industry by search engines. Additionally, Google’s updated E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) ranking guidelines emphasize the importance of high-quality, first-hand insights, reinforcing the need for expert-driven content.
Backlinko’s 2024 SEO analysis highlights this shift, showing that expert voices are now more critical than ever. Customers naturally gravitate toward brands that demonstrate credibility through professional authorship. This trend is echoed by Surfer SEO’s recent survey, where 90% of SEO professionals identified topical authority as essential to their strategy.
A niche writer understands the nuances of your industry. They know specific phrases and search terms your target audience uses. They’ll craft content that naturally incorporates these keywords while providing real value to readers, leading to higher rankings on search engine results pages. Better rankings mean more visibility, more clicks, and ultimately more conversions.
Avoid Spreading Misinformation
In some industries, accuracy is non-negotiable. Imagine a medical article providing outdated or incorrect information, or a legal guide omitting critical compliance details. Inaccurate content can lead to serious consequences for your readers — and your reputation.
Expert writers ensure that your content is well-researched, up-to-date, and credible.
9 Niches Our Experts Cover
Finding a talented and knowledgeable writer isn’t easy. We source writers who are not only skilled in their craft but also subject matter authorities in their field. We make sure our niche writers are relevant, coming from industries with some of the fastest-growing businesses, according to Merchant Machine’s global analysis.
Here are nine (of the many) niches our experts cover.
1. Financial
Money may not buy happiness, but it does power economies. Our financial writers understand complex topics like investment strategies, retirement planning, tax laws, and financial regulations. We hire financial experts with experience across all sectors like crypto, accounting, banking, and insurance.
Whether you need whitepapers for institutional investors or blog posts for everyday savers, our financial writers create content that’s clear, actionable, and tailored to your audience’s knowledge level.
2. Medical
The healthcare industry thrives on trust and accuracy. From patient education materials to marketing content for medical devices, our writers specialize in creating content that is both empathetic and scientifically accurate.
Wellness, fitness, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology are just a few areas we cover. Need proof? Read our article about why hiring a medical writer can be a critical choice.
3. Construction
In an industry built on precision, our construction writers lay a strong foundation for your niche content. We write for contractors, architects, and suppliers, covering topics like sustainable building practices, industry trends, and project management strategies.
Our writers can craft everything from case studies about successful projects to instructional guides for specialized equipment.
4. Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the backbone of innovation, and our manufacturing writers bring technical expertise to this critical sector. Whether you’re a small-scale producer or a global industrial giant, we craft content that showcases your products, processes, and achievements.
Think product manuals, whitepapers on industry advancements, or marketing materials that demystify complex manufacturing processes.
5. Legal
The legal industry relies on precision and compliance, and our legal writers deliver on both fronts. They can create content that simplifies legal concepts for a general audience or dive deep into legal nuances for professionals.
From writing about contract law to producing content for law firm blogs, our experts understand the stakes involved in legal writing and prioritize accuracy above all else.
6. Marketing
Marketing is all about connecting with your audience. Our marketing writers are experts in crafting compelling content that drives engagement and conversions. They especially understand the importance of topical authority and trustworthiness in helping your business grow its market share.
From email campaigns and social media posts to in-depth guides on marketing strategies, we help businesses stay ahead of industry trends while speaking directly to their target audience.
7. Technology
Technology is constantly evolving, and our tech writers keep pace with advancements in AI, blockchain, cybersecurity, and more. Our subject matter authorities boast backgrounds in SaaS, cybersecurity, FinTech, and more.
We specialize in translating complex technical concepts into digestible content, whether it’s for a tech-savvy audience or customers new to the industry. Need an article about the latest AI tools or an in-depth guide on cloud computing? We’ve got you covered.
8. Hospitality
Hospitality writing is more than just sharing savvy travel tips. Our expert hospitality writers hail from all corners of the globe. They come with experience in travel, hotels, restaurants, and many other hospitality sectors.
Whether you need a detailed travel guide to Caribbean cruise ports or actionable managerial advice for your kitchen staff, our hospitality writers are here to give you the white glove treatment.
9. Real Estate
The real estate market is a growing industry. And it’s ever-changing. Our real estate writers stay up to date on industry trends, local regulations, and customer needs.
Whether you want market analysis, property descriptions, or information that helps buyers and sellers navigate the home-buying process, our real estate writers create compelling content that builds trust and drives action.
Stand Out in Your Industry with a Niche Writer
Your content is the voice of your business. Why settle for generic messaging when you can work with industry experts? Whether you need to rank higher on search engines, connect with your ideal audience, or position yourself as an authority, niche writers are your secret weapon.
Ready to dive deeper into your business and unlock your conversion potential? Check out our specialty content services and find out how our expert writers can help.
About 83% of digital marketers and content creators report prioritizing quality over quantity in their current digital content marketing strategies. Thanks to generative AI and other automation tools, mass content creation has never been easier. However, these recent strides in technology automation have not made it any less challenging to consistently produce valuable, engaging material.
If anything, the recent barrage of developments in digital content creation tools has left many in the field feeling overwhelmed and technology-fatigued. Already, nearly half — 45% — of sales and marketing professionals would prefer to reduce the sheer number of tools in their technology stacks. As such, an industry shift toward quality-over-quantity tactics makes the content creation process even more resource-intensive, requiring dedicated talent across writing, editing, design, and strategy.
To meet these demands, companies are also ramping up their content marketing budgets, with 50% of marketers increasing their investment in content marketing this year. However, with rising investments comes the challenge of managing numerous moving parts. Many teams find themselves juggling various tools and platforms to coordinate efforts for a death march pace of daily publication across multiple channels.
Express Writers offers a simple solution to this challenge. By centralizing all aspects of content creation — from strategy to final edits — in one capable agency, businesses can keep their teams on their primary tasks, while still ensuring timely delivery of top-quality content and dispensing outright with the hassle of managing separate contributors.
The Complexity of Modern Content Creation
You probably know all too well how time and resource-intensive it is to manage content creation internally or with fragmented freelancers. Regardless of size and budget, all companies face the logistical complexity of coordinating multiple roles. For large corporate organizations, acquiring and retaining a diverse range of specialized content creation talents is at least feasible, even if it’s not particularly easy.
However, if you’re already outsourcing writing, it’s unlikely you’ve got the necessary resources to bring it all in-house.
So, the familiar time and resource drain remains formidable. Marketing teams must dedicate substantial hours to briefing and managing separate roles — earning you repetitive feedback loops and increased project timelines in the process. Additionally, your already over-tasked teams still need to track individual deadlines, align multiple schedules, and ensure consistency across outputs that require ongoing administrative oversight. It’s altogether unsurprising that this patchwork process diverts focus from your primary business goals.
For companies looking to scale content, these operational inefficiencies only multiply with growth, limiting your ability to produce high-quality work quickly. What, then, does the alternative look like?
What Do You Get from an All-in-One Digital Content Marketing Team?
Here are some of the benefits you can expect from handing over your entire digital content creation process to an all-in-one agency.
1. Streamlined Communication
When businesses work with Express Writers, they are assigned a dedicated content manager to serve as a single point of contact for all their content needs. This structure eliminates the need for back-and-forth with multiple freelancers or team members across different stages of your process. Instead, your content manager oversees everything — from initial strategy and briefing to coordinating edits and final delivery.
With a single contact managing the entire team, businesses save considerable time and cut down on the casual miscommunications that plague processes requiring constant communication with multiple contributors. Your content manager keeps writers, editors, and designers on task, working cohesively toward shared goals and timely delivery. This setup improves efficiency and allows our clients to focus on what they do best.
2. Efficient Project Management
Our all-in-one content team provides a structured, efficient approach to project management. At Express Writers, your content manager coordinates all phases of your projects, from initial planning to final edits. Having proactive oversight prevents common delays caused by independent contractors who typically work at varying speeds and create bottlenecks in the content pipeline.
With each contributor aligned to the same timeline and quality standards, your team can transition from one stage to the next, with no accumulating downtime. Your writers, editors, and designers are always working with a shared understanding of your project’s priorities and deadlines. As a result, clients receive their content on time and consistently meet their marketing goals without last-minute rushes or missed opportunities.
3. Access to Specialized Talent and Expertise
When clients sign on for our end-to-end content creation process, they gain access to a range of specialized experts across multiple content formats and professional fields. Rather than relying on a single generalist, our team includes skilled writers, editors, graphic designers, and video editors, each with extensive experience in their respective fields. As such, each element of your content — from written copy to visual media — gets the attention of an expert who understands the nuances of their field.
For instance, our graphic designers create visuals with an eye for both enhancing written content and aligning with your unique brand standards and identity. Meanwhile, our video editors craft engaging video content designed to resonate with today’s audiences. By having a full roster of specialists, our clients don’t need to source talent independently. This saves them time and guarantees high-quality, polished results.
4. Consistent Quality Control
In our experience, one of the most challenging parts of the digital content creation process to bring in-house is consistent quality control for every deliverable. At Express Writers, every piece of content we create for you passes through a structured quality assurance (QA) process, involving editors and QA specialists rigorously reviewing each detail for accuracy, readability, and brand alignment. We do more than just catch typos. We use the consensus of several pairs of eyes to guarantee your content exactly captures your brand’s voice and takes advantage of up-to-date insights into what appeals to contemporary audiences.
When we create content for our clients, each piece undergoes a multi-step review. Writers bring their expertise to the draft, editors refine it for tone and clarity, and QA specialists confirm it’s polished, ready for publication, and free of any technical or formatting errors. Our thorough approach minimizes errors and provides a hands-off experience for our clients, who can trust their brand will be represented accurately and professionally.
By centralizing quality control within one team, clients also avoid the risks of inconsistent output associated with projects involving multiple freelancers or teams. Every deliverable we produce meets a reliable standard. So, if you’ve been satisfied with written work outsourced to our agency, you can absolutely expect the same level of satisfaction from working with our all-in-one teams.
5. Scalability for Growing Needs
For most companies, scaling content creation processes across periods of sustained growth will consume in-house resources disproportionately. For example, writing an effective blog post takes an average of 4 hours — not to mention 6+ to reliably garner “strong results.” So, even if your teams can adequately handle what’s on their plates today, you’ll still have to manage growth in chunks of 4-6 hours of dedicated attention at a time.
Alternatively, Express Writers offers built-in scalability. Whether you need a steady stream of weekly blog posts or an intensive campaign launch, our team will adjust to your needs without the hassle of recruiting, training, or managing additional freelancers.
As your content demands increase, our capacity to support them remains constant. We have a network of specialized professionals ready to handle larger volumes or tackle new types of projects — from white papers and case studies to multimedia content like infographics and videos. This flexibility allows our clients to respond to seasonal demands, new market opportunities, or product launches without missing a beat.
Let Us Simplify the Content Creation Process for You
Our all-in-one approach to content creation transforms what’s often a time-intensive, Rube Goldberg Machine into an efficient, reliable system. With Express Writers, clients work with a dedicated content manager who coordinates every element of their project from start to finish. The structure our approach provides prevents bottlenecks and allows your marketing teams to focus on their pressing tasks.
By centralizing all aspects of content production, our team will provide you with high-quality work across multiple formats and will scale efforts up or down to match your evolving needs. Whether it’s a need for more consistent quality control or flexible project volume, our approach adapts to each client’s goals without the need to constantly onboard new resources.
So, if your business needs reliable, professional content — in multiple formats and expressed in your unique brand voice — you might consider giving us the reins for a few delivery cycles. We believe you’ll be more than satisfied with the results.
Businesses need to deliver high-quality content that not only informs but also enhances the user experience. Crafting that content can be a challenge. This is where hiring a technical writer can make a significant difference. A technical writer can ensure clear, precise communication and reduce errors. By improving accuracy, a technical writer can enhance the overall user experience, support business goals, and avoid costly mistakes — all while ensuring your content maintains a professional, authoritative tone.
Continue reading to learn more reasons why you should hire a technical writer for your business.
Reasons to Hire a Professional Tech Writer Rather than Doing It Yourself
Here are seven reasons why it’s typically a better business choice to hire a professional tech writer for content creation, rather than just winging it with free or in-house resources.
1.Expertise in Communication
As with many professional fields, excellence in writing comes from hundreds to thousands of hours of practice, refined by constant feedback. Experienced professional technical writers excel at transforming complex technical information into clear, user-friendly content.
2. Cost Efficiency
Outsourcing technical writing allows businesses to pay for professionally written content as they need. Going with in-house staff requires committing to fixed expenses associated with hiring, training, and providing benefits to full-time writers.
3. Time Optimization
When you entrust documentation tasks to experts, your people can concentrate on their core responsibilities. This way you’ll get both products and written content to market faster.
4. Enhanced User Experience
For potentially complex products like software or machinery, high-quality technical documentation will typically obviate a lot of avoidable user frustration by providing users with clear instructions on appropriate technical difficulty.
5. Access to Specialized Knowledge
Hiring technical writing services gives you access to expertise across various industries. For example, if your business manufactures automotive electronics and plans to market to aviation installers as well, you’ll either need to find and acquire an already experienced and credentialed aviation professional to navigate the more complex regulations or you can simply contract with an agency that has the professional expertise you need, with availability for as much or as little work as you require.
6. Reduction in Errors
Professional technical writers are adept at creating accurate and consistent documentation, minimizing the risk of errors that can arise from miscommunication or lack of expertise. Depending on what your business sells, fewer errors will help you avoid either minor inconveniences or potentially disastrous liabilities.
Comprehensive and up-to-date documentation reduces technical debt — the accumulation of additional work due to shortcuts or rushed decisions. If you assign an engineer or some other kind of technical specialist an overwhelming amount of writing responsibilities — perhaps involving complex document assembly or content written at different levels of technical competence — you’ll likely have to pay considerably more to remedy the situation after the fact.
Some Less Obvious Reasons to Hire a Real, Breathing Technical Writer
The reasons listed above are — for the most part — reasons to outsource just about anything your business doesn’t actually specialize in doing. Over the last few decades, successive waves of new technologies — the internet, collaboration apps like Zoom and Slack, and cloud services in particular — have made it possible for businesses, small and large, to outsource pretty much everything from marketing and sales to human resource management and payroll services. In fields like IT, outsourcing has effectively become standard practice, with 92% of G2000 companies relying on outside IT services.
In short, the modern world allows you to find whatever expertise you lack and pay for only as much of it as you want. And this line of reasoning applies to technical writing as much as any other kind of specialized expertise.
The Role AI Plays in Technical Writing Options
What are the less obvious reasons to hire professional writing services — reasons that don’t equally apply to other potentially outsourced tasks?
If I were writing this blog any more than three years ago, the phrase “doing it yourself” in this context would have rather unequivocally meant something like “assigning writing responsibilities to some technically knowledgeable employee and hoping for the best.” However, in any conversation going on today, “doing it yourself” almost certainly means outsourcing written content to generative AI.
AI tools like ChatGPT can crank out pages of readable, fairly accurate technical content in minutes rather than hours — and all without typos, misspellings, and the odd conflation of “then” and “than.”
Why not save some money and go with free and passable AI-generated content?
Successfully teaching machines to process and generate human language is an amazing breakthrough in the history of human technology, rivaling — for sheer complexity and required ingenuity — achievements like human flight or splitting the atom. But on its own, it doesn’t tell us anything about how people feel about reading AI-generated content versus good old-fashioned human-written content.
Data Behind the Benefits of a Human Tech Writer
Studies suggest that while most people probably aren’t as good at distinguishing human-written content from generative AI outputs as they think they are, they nevertheless have some strong, value-based opinions on the subject.
Let’s look at the findings of some recent studies — and please pardon the three-foot titles preferred in academia:
On the whole, what these and other studies indicate is that when readers identify AI-generated content in a technical context, their estimation of the authority and credibility of the text goes down. As a reader’s ability to make this distinction scales with understanding the subject matter, AI-generated technical content is likely to be most off-putting to exactly the audience it targets.
Capture Your Audience’s Attention with Human Content
These developments are all still quite new and only partially understood. This apparent preference for human-generated insights may turn out to represent a real distinction in value. Or it may be simply a kind of nostalgia akin to our habit of placing a higher value on handmade things once machines start to make them. For business purposes, however, it doesn’t really matter.
For now, most people — and by extension, most of your potential customers — identify expertise as a still uniquely human quality. If you want to capture their attention and gain their trust, you’ll need to speak to them with an identifiably human voice.
Human beings have fretted over the possible ways new technologies might affect us as long as we’ve had the means to record our worries and anxieties for posterity. In 370 BC, in the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates spoke at length about the perils of a new fad that would “introduce forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it.” He warned his audience that users of this drug — for Socrates calls it a pharmakon in Greek — will “not practice using their memories, because they will put their trust in it instead.”
So, what was this nascent form of premodern TikTok with the power to destroy people’s memories outright? It was the art of writing itself. The notion that — for the first time — we could put knowledge somewhere besides our own minds. In a thing. On a shelf.
While Socrates’ hot take on the downsides of literacy likely seem freakishly exaggerated to us now, we’ve certainly not ceased to worry that for every bell and whistle we add to world around us to better serve our needs and wants, we might lose something of ourselves in the process. Researchers at UC Irvine have been conducting a continuous study in trends in the human attention span since 2004. And so far, the observed trend has been singular and pointing in one direction only.
20 years ago, the average human attention span — measured by the amount time spent on a task before switching to another — was two and a half minutes. By 2012, it had diminished to 75 seconds. And in 2024, most of us go looking for distraction after a mere 47 seconds — about 10 seconds longer than it took you to reach the end of this paragraph, if you read at an average pace.
Yeah, So Get to the Point and Tell Me How Long My Stuff Should Be Already
Given that we’re all thoroughly “distracted from distraction by distraction” — a criticism of our minds’ aimless wanderings penned 71 years before the release of the first iPhone — what’s the magic number of words for effectively communicating content without losing the audience? If our attention spans are only getting shorter, should content length simply follow suit?
Not exactly.
After all, most of us want our readers to do more than just endure our content till the end. We’d like them to share it, cite it, or even go and make a decision in the real world based on something they learned from it. And speaking to that part of ourselves — our action-driving values lurking just below the surface of our fleeting attention — requires a little more than just giving our first and worst impulses what they want all the time.
Stirring people into action or to convince them of a new idea — be it the moral necessity of a grand cause or the superiority of a particular sneaker — seems to take a bit longer. Based on the average word count of first-page content on Google in March 2024, you need about five and a half minutes of your reader’s more-or-less undivided attention — or roughly 1400 words at the average adult reading pace — to get the keys clacking and the thumbs tapping out those precious conversion actions.
What Does Everyone Else Say?
Of course, there’s more to the world of content performance metrics than just Google Analytics. Afterall, averages can be deceiving without context. For example, both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have homes in the 3000-resident township of Medina, WA. Nevertheless, locals should probably not expect their creditworthiness to skyrocket based on the town’s average net worth per resident alone. Similarly, figuring out optimal content length requires a bit more information.
Let’s look at what the other hierophants of content marketing have to say.
BuzzSumo
Publishing platform specialists BuzzSumo recently conducted a study of 400,000 long-form blogs and articles to identify the hallmarks of high-performing content. They found that length does positively correlate with performance within a specific range, such that pieces shorter than 1000 words suffered a 1% reduced chance of high engagement with diminishing returns… well returning… above 2000 words.
SEO gurus Moz have mostly chosen to answer the question “How long should blogs be?” with a set of questions you should ask yourself about your own audience and goals first.
In large datasets used to calculate averages, how many of the studied posts target the same keywords as your content?
How do you tell correlation from causation? Afterall, the top result for any search query didn’t achieve that position based on having a magic word count. It simply communicated something better than the available alternatives.
What’s the quality of traffic the highest performers receive? If the quality is low, is it worth imitating?
Semrush
Semrush’s most recent State of Content Marketing Global Report found that blog posts with over 3,000 words receive 138% more page views than those with fewer than 500 words. They concluded this is largely because longer articles tend to be more comprehensive and detailed, qualities that surprisingly appeal to both search engines and their putative human masters. Nonetheless, relevance and quality still trump length outright, as unnecessarily long posts will inevitably lose reader engagement.
To determine the best length for your specific needs, Semrush recommends:
Establishing Clear Goals: Define whether your aim is to rank high on search engines, drive social media shares, generate leads, or promote a product.
Understanding Your Audience: Tailor the content length to your readers’ preferences and their level of expertise on the topic.
Focusing on Search Intent: Analyze the top-ranking articles for your target keywords to gauge the appropriate length and structure.
Backlinko
Backlinko has published some mold-breaking content on the subject of content length. Their analysis of 912 million blog posts found that comprehensive and detailed articles are more likely to receive backlinks and social media shares.
In another noticeably 41,130-word post entitled How to Write a Blog Post: The Definitive Guide — a kind of ultimate guide to ultimate guides — Backlinko says longer blog posts often rank higher on search engines and are more likely to be shared on social media platforms. And the difference is value, which attracts more readers and encourages them to share the information with others. Specifically, expanded list posts and ultimate guides that take the time to deeply explore topics and provide extensive information have enjoyed the most success.
Ahrefs
According to recent insights from Ahrefs, the ideal blog post length generally ranges from 1500 to 2000 words. Their analysis indicates longer content tends to attract more organic traffic and backlinks — the stuff you presumably want — than lower quality traffic. However, Ahrefs also notes a diminishing return on engagement for posts exceeding 2000 words. In other words, you probably can’t compete with the highest performers without longer content, but length alone won’t get you there.
The key takeaway from Ahrefs is to focus on creating thorough, high-quality content that comprehensively covers the topic without unnecessary fluff. Fluff is, of course, audience relative. If I were trying to sell you hot wings or modify your opinion of a large fracking operation, my opening bon mots about Socrates would have almost certainly sent you elsewhere. But in a post about writing, whatever got you here in the first place probably came with an expanded sense of relevance.
Hubspot
According to recent data from HubSpot, the ideal blog post length for SEO and user engagement is between 2100 and 2400 words. HubSpot’s analysis shows that longer, in-depth blog posts tend to attract more organic traffic. Again, this is presumably because comprehensive content covers more subtopics and provides detailed information that meets user intent effectively.
Additionally, HubSpot emphasizes the importance of creating scannable content.
Even for longer posts.
Breaking down the content into smaller, digestible sections.
With clear:
Subheadings
Bullet points
To better maintain reader engagement.
This approach ensures content remains accessible and appealing, even if it would raise the blood pressure of your favorite college English professor.
So Now What?
Well, now that you’re caught up on what the experts have said recently, we should probably discuss how things are going to change.
A lot.
And soon.
If you haven’t spent the last two years sequestered in private meditation, you’re probably aware that major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are about to snowball. As good as ChatGPT is at crafting topical limericks or summarizing your boss’ verbose emails, the technology driving it is about to get plugged into search engines in some fundamentally game-changing ways.
Now that anyone can crank out blogs at a pace of dozens per minute with generative AI tools, finding ways to surface meaningful, useful content in search engines has become more important than ever, both for search engine users and developers.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
On the user side of things, this new urgency has brought us answer engine optimization (AEO), a tactic for publishers to optimize content specifically for answer engines like Google Assistant, Siri, or Amazon Alexa.
The goal of AEO is to create content that answers specific user queries directly and concisely. It involves structuring content in a Q&A format, using clear and straightforward language, and targeting long-tail keywords to match conversational search queries. AEO tries to deliver content that is easily digestible for AI-driven voice search tools and that can be cited accurately in voice search responses. Whether formatting will eventually get the edge on length as a performance indicator remains to be seen.
Search Generative Experience (SGE)
On the development side, things are about to get even wilder. Google’s recently announced search generative experience (SGE) is an advanced AI-driven feature designed to enhance traditional search results. SGE synthesizes information from various sources — meaning not just yours — to generate comprehensive and contextually relevant answers directly within the search interface. Great for the user, perhaps less for the publisher.
Unlike AEO, which optimizes for specific queries, SGE aims to provide a broader understanding of user intent by leveraging machine learning to interpret complex queries and generate detailed, authoritative responses. While much remains unclear about how this will all work in practice, the consensus seems to be that content optimized for SGE should be structured to be easily parsed by AI algorithms
So, You Got Any of Those Best Practices We Love to Skip Ahead to?
That probably depends on whether you prefer short, wrong answers or long, less wrong answers. Anyone peddling the ‘right’ answer is almost certainly having another kind of conversation altogether.
Ideal blog post length will probably remain somewhere in the range of 1000-2000 words, for the foreseeable future. But the foreseeable part of the future has contracted a lot in the last few years, so hang on to your skepticism.
What Seems to Be the Case:
Longer content tends to attract more organic traffic, backlinks, and social shares.
Posts exceeding 2000 words experience diminishing returns.
Quality — as defined by user-intent — trumps length, format, and pretty much everything else.
Technology is going to radically change a lot of things soon but probably not that last point.
So, if high-quality writing is going to continue to win out at the end of the day — even in a time when we reverse-Turing test ourselves to prove to each other we’re still human — we’re probably going to need to keep around a few of those pesky, undeniably-human writers. We know a few and they’re eager to meet you
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