How Long Should Senior Living Blog Posts Be? - Senior Care Content Specialists

Are you trying to improve the effectiveness of your senior living blog posts?

Throwing a few paragraphs in to a senior living blog post and pushing “Publish” just won’t cut it anymore.

Almost every senior living provider has a blog of some variety on their site. The catch is the vast majority of them just aren’t performing.

For reasons ranging from poor writing quality to a lack of relevant keywords, senior living blog posts don’t always measure up.

A question we are often asked here at SCCS is how long a blog post should be.

While it’s a great question to ask, it’s not an easy one to answer.

Senior Living Blogs and Word Count

Our standard answer when people ask us this question is “that depends.” We know. It’s a terrible answer.

Like when a chef tells you to add enough quinoa to your homemade veggie soup until it “tastes right” or to saute your Soba noodles in peanut butter until they “look right.” Not at all helpful…

But the truth is there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to writing senior living blogs. But there are a few factors to keep in mind that will help:

Complex topics: Senior living is a complex issue. Families get overwhelmed with all of the details. It’s often a better idea to break a complicated topic up in to a series of articles, and link them to each other. That makes it easier for families to digest.
Thin content: Google dislikes thin content. And for good reason. Content that is less than 200 or 250 words in length tends to be spam. Someone trying to sell something shady might disguise it in a blog post. That usually means thin content. Google ranks thin content lower in an effort to ensure searchers have access to good quality content first. So you should shoot for a minimum of 300 words in all of your senior living blog posts.
Relevance: Along the same lines as thin content is relevance. Google wants searchers to get answers to their questions. If you create high quality content that keeps people on your site, Google will deem your content to have relevance for the key phrase used to find it. That will help you rank high. By contrast, if your senior living content is fluffy stuff that doesn’t help, searchers will abandon it quickly and head back to the search engine results page. (Content mills are often guilty of selling you these types of cheap blog posts.) So the lesson on this point is to write as many words as you need to cover the topic.
Attention span: We’ve all seen the stat that people have the attention span of a goldfish, which experts miraculously measured to be nine seconds. It’s true that most people have a short attention span. Since the majority of traffic to senior living blog posts now comes via mobile, you are likely competing with a television in the background or a conversation among families. Keep that in mind as you write.

Our final tip is to review your analytics frequently.

Look to see what blogs are performing best—and worst—and how long they are. That will give you good insight in to your visitors’ behavior (i.e. are long form posts pushing them away) and what they are looking for in terms of topics.

If you’d like to learn more about making the most of your senior living blog posts, you might find these articles to be helpful:

Have a question about senior living blogs? Drop us a note! We’ll try to help you find an answer.