Don't Worry About the Length of Your Blog Intro
Editors often focus on arbitrary blog intro length requirements rather than what is important: what is the blog intro trying to do?
This post is written explicitly for SEO content writers looking to improve their content writing by focusing on their blog intros.
Clients and writers sometimes insist that a blog intro be short and brief. Keep it punchy, above the fold. For a while, I just accepted this age-old content-writing wisdom as written in stone. When you start as a writer, in all fields, but especially content writing, you too quickly (and often to the detriment of your own writing) listen to whoever is paying you. For content writers, this means bending to the editorial advice of SEOs and marketing managers (i.e., mostly non-writers). Writers have that unique position of almost always being hired not to bring in new ideas but to follow orders. (Viewed like this, it’s no surprise people think AI can replace writers because writers are functioning already, to some extent, as bots that you feed info into to get content out of.)
But the more I write and publish, the more I see content that goes against such age-old wisdom yet still ranks well and converts well. The more I analyze a piece by how it connects to the target reader, ignoring all other honestly arbitrary metrics like content readability, the more I challenge preconceived notions of “good content,” such as “keep your intros short.”
4 Reasons to Keep Your Blog Intro Short (and Why They Don’t Make Sense)
So, why does an intro need to be short? Here are some things I’ve heard from writers, editors, marketers, etc.
Most people don’t read intros anyway. They skip over them. If this is true, then why bother making it short? If, let’s say, 95% of readers won’t read the intro no matter what, then don’t cater to them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to cater to the 5% of readers who will?
The intro is supposed to tease and pull in the reader. I’m okay with the latter, as “pull[ing] in the reader” is a function of good writing (though this is not limited to the intro). Good content pulls. But pulling in a reader doesn’t necessitate that something be short. Sometimes, as we will see below, pulling in the reader requires something long.
But the first part of this bullet point, “to tease,” is silly to me. Why are we teasing? Why are we not providing value from the beginning? A blog intro is not a commercial or trailer for an upcoming movie to get the audience interested. A movie trailer gets you excited about seeing a movie that you had not yet heard of. A YouTube ad is interrupting the thing you want to try and pitch something else. In both situations, you’re passive, an observer. Content is happening to you, so it has more work to do. A blog intro doesn’t happen to you. When you click on a blog article, you’re already invested in the content (based on the title or something else). Your reader is active. Now is not the time to tease again, but to provide value, to write with their momentum and pull them in.
People will get bored and jump off the page. If this is true, it’s a content quality problem. People reading content online are looking for that content. They clicked on the link, whether they saw it in the SERP, in an ad, or on your landing page. They’re actively engaged in finding the content. Plus, if a long intro is enough to get someone to close the page, how will they respond to your body sections in the post? This just doesn’t make sense.
SEO favors short intros. This is often conflating higher reader engagement with shorter intros, operating under the belief that longer intros make readers bounce off. But that is not an intro length problem, that’s a content quality problem.
Finally, short and brief are imprecise terms. I often insist that editors use more precise terms. This is difficult to do, and there’s a reason for that. It can teach you as an editor that you may not know what you think you know.
My point here is, what the hell does “short” mean? Short is a non-quantified amount that will change based on what you’re writing. A short intro for a blog post on making a latte is bound to be shorter than a short intro to a blog post about a more complex and non-trivial topic. But editors who insist on short intros almost always mean 2–3 short paragraphs, and well above the fold. They don’t consider the topic or the audience, just advice they’ve heard from others.
A lot of the discussion around the length of a blog intro, and other writer vanity metrics, like grade level and Grammarly scores, stems from people focusing on things that do not matter because they’re unwilling or unable to focus on the things that do.
Instead of focusing on whether an intro is short or long, focus on whether your intro addresses the specific reader you’re trying to reach, provides value to the reader, and propels the article into the following section. More than all of that, does your intro keep the reader reading?
In short, if you’re approaching a white page and thinking, “Time to write a short snappy intro to get the reader’s attention,” then you’re starting on the wrong foot. Your writing is being shaped by style, not by substance.
Let’s look at two examples of blog intros below, one very short and one very long.
A Very Short Blog Intro Explained
Here’s an intro I wrote for Geekbot for a post targeting the keyword Range alternatives.
This article was written as part of my work at Grow and Convert, a content marketing agency that helps companies create a profitable organic channel via blog content.
Some things about this intro:
It’s only 77 words, including the call to action at the end.
It’s proportionate to the length of the post, which is only ~800 words.
The intro takes up roughly 9% of the content.
It’s not that short intros are better, and that’s why we used one here. Instead, this specific keyword and client mashup yielded a brief introduction.
Geekbot is a relatively straightforward product with simple value props. It’s an asynchronous daily stand-up, Slack and MS Teams integration. More than that, there isn’t much to say about the key differences between Range and Geekbot.
We wrote this article on the assumption that the reader doesn’t want Range yet wants something similar to Range. This is based on the keyword we were targeting, “Range Alternatives.”
Because of this, we felt confident about diving into Geekbot, which is a Range alternative.
As a side note, this entire article is only 800 words. It’s an exceptionally short article, an outlier. But making this post 800 words was not easy. The initial draft was around 1600 words. I worked with the editor to cut everything we could, trimming it down to the bare essentials.
Now let’s look at a completely different topic, client, and approach.
A Very Long Blog Intro Explained
For a different client, I wrote a post about agency reporting software – specifically, 6 ways the client improved agency reporting software. The intro, including the CTA, is 689 words. It takes two screenshots to capture, meaning the intro itself goes below the fold.
At 689 words, this intro isn’t that much shorter than the entire Geekbot article.
First, some words on strategy. This keyword is about a much more nuanced topic: agency reporting software. There is discussion of data integrations, multiple dashboards, third-party reporting tools, reporting summaries, client management, etc.
Second, the angle of this piece is about how our client has improved and changed the software. It just has more meat to it. We wanted to discuss both a) the common features of this software and b) how TapClicks has improved upon them.
Each bullet section in the intro corresponds to a header in the body, and appropriately, the bullet section is shorter than the body section.
For example, our first improvement reads:
“Improvement #1: We can integrate virtually any data set into your TapClicks database. Most reporting tools have some finite set of API connections to popular marketing platforms like Google and Facebook, and that’s it. If you have data you want to report on from a more obscure source, you have to deal with it manually. TapClicks, on the other hand, comes with the ability to create custom connectors to virtually any data source, whether it has an active API or not. We’ve created connections to thousands of data sources to date.”
That’s 91 words long. Our first section in the body, where we cover improvement #1 in more detail, is 201 words long.
Our second improvement reads:
“Improvement #2: We don’t just pull in data, but we make it easy for you to filter through your data. If you’re handling businesses in multiple locations, then sifting through the data can be a tiring headache. Your advertising platform will list data by campaigns but when you pull that data into TapClicks, you can filter by a single location, region, state, nation, and even at the global level.
That’s 69 words long. The corresponding section in the body is 293 words long.
My point is that we didn’t put everything there was to put in the intro, but the specifics that are meant to convey to the reader that a) we know what we’re talking about and b) we’re talking about things you want to know.
The entire article itself is 5,677 words. This is also exceptional in that most posts I write aren’t this long.
In this way, the intro is 11% of the piece (compare that to the Geekbot intro, which was 9% of the piece). In short, is this long intro really long compared to the article it introduces the reader to?
Finally, What Can an Editor Potentially Mean When They Say Your Blog Intro is Too Long?
One takeaway is this: writers and editors do a disservice to a piece of content when they arbitrarily limit the length of an intro. Sometimes, a shorter intro works, and sometimes, a longer one does. This issue stems from a larger issue: approaching your blog post template-first vs. content-first.
That being said, it’s good for writers to meet an editor where they’re at or to see what their criticisms are potentially pointing at, even if the criticism is misguided or worded poorly. Often, writers and non-writers alike struggle to articulate why they have an issue with something they’re reading. Giving good, pointed feedback is hard. Someone’s feedback that your intro is “too long” could be pointing to the fact that your intro just isn’t very good.
Here are some things to consider when an editor tells you your blog intro is too long.
Maybe it’s too fluffy. Your intro can be full of irrelevant information or include a narrative that, while interesting, is not critical to the piece.
Maybe you’re getting too detailed with one claim in your intro. Let’s say your blog post has three claims to make. You cover each argument in the intro, but spend significantly longer on one of the arguments, providing claim after claim. This can come across as lopsided and unnecessary, as you go into the point in more detail in the body of the post.
Maybe you're writing towards too many audiences in one intro. By trying to reach everyone, you can often exclude more than include. This can also create a rambling intro where you’re doing your best to list or name all of your potential readers.
I haven’t checked the word count of my intros in a long time. Sometimes, an editor will still ping me and ask me to shorten an intro. When they do, I don’t figure out its word count and tell myself, “okay I’ll cut it by 50 words.” Instead, I analyze what the intro is doing and whether or not I can improve upon it. Often I can, but when I can it’s due to one of the issues above, not the length.