How Does Length Matter in Business Blog Post Titles?

“How long?” is one question I hear a lot at corporate blogging training sessions. 

Typically the business owner or freelance blog content writer is referring to the recommended length of blog posts. Sometimes, though, the question concerns the length of the blog post title.

Charles of netbulders.org looks as blog title length and content.  It’s not enough, according to him, for a title to contain the words of a reader’s search query.  For the title to be effective, he adds, it must appear to have been created specifically for the purpose of answering that very query.

As a longtime professional ghost blogger, working to create SEO marketing blog content for a variety of Say It For You clients, I thought the example Charles offers is particularly on target:

If he were looking to build a chicken coop, Charles posits, using the search phrase ‘How to build a chicken coop’, two possible results might be:

A. Chicken Coops: Buying, Building, and Maintaining Them
B. How to Build a Chicken Coop

Result A, Charles points out, wouldn’t appeal to him; it doesn’t promise to answer his specific query in detail.  Result B, on the other hand, seems to have been created specifically for the purpose of answering his query.

If there’s a lesson here for all of us Indianapolis business blog writers, it would relate to targeting. In other words, the most effective length for any one blog post title is whatever it takes to signal to online searchers that “right here” is the place they want to be to get answers.

Business blog writing overall can certainly cast a wider net (to include, in Charles’ example, prospective customers who don’t want to build their own chicken coop, but want to buy one and learn to maintain it) the tactic of keeping a very specific focus within each post and clearly describing that focus in the title is more likely to “catch” a click.

In the end, the answer to “How long?” that is likely to provide the greatest business blogging assistance might be this:

Just long enough to get that “Aha!” response from online searchers!