SERPS or Visitor Attention

We all know that quality content is king in our SEO efforts, but what about the best length for our posts? I started out targeting my posts for around 500 to 800 words. Then I raised it to around 1,000 words when I started to see comments that this was a better target word count. Google liked it ... leading to better SERPs.

I found that what seemed more natural for some of my posts was closer to 1,200 words. I thought 1,000 to 1,200 words ... I should still be ok. Lately I'm seeing suggestions that 1,500 words is a better target post length for getting more traffic ... you know, better SERPs. So I'm wondering ... where is this headed?

A 1,500 word post is a long post ... takes around 7 to 8 minutes to read. Am I going to keep attention of visitors? That's the goal ... right? Keeping our site visitors engaged on our site as long as possible is the goal. I know when I see a post that goes on ... and on ... and on it has to really have my attention to keep me interested.

So do we have a dilemma here? Longer posts improve our SERPs which leads to more traffic. But will these 1,500+ word posts tend to loose the attention of our visitors reducing the probability of capturing their interest in our affiliate offers? Is the benefit of higher word count in our posts conflicting with the goal of increasing the chances of an affiliate click?