In many facets of life, we are always taught to keep it brief.
Even social media platforms in their infancy tried to stress brevity by only permitting so many words and characters in our posts.
Changes that allow for more words and characters are recent updates. So it would reason that content should follow these same rules of brevity, right?
To have higher performing content, longer is better. This long form content can help drive your SEO, which is the goal we all want for our content as marketers.
There is a bit of debate on what word count constitutes the beginning of a long form content piece.
Some agencies would say a word count of 700 is the start of a long content piece.
Others would set 1800 words as the starting point for long form content pieces.
In the industry, you can usually find consensus around calling a 1200 word piece of content a longer piece of content.
The proper length is dependent on the industry and what the purpose of the content is. While many content writers and agencies think 500-800 word pieces are in demand and what readers crave, this isn’t the case.
There is absolutely a need for content in that word count range, but longer pieces perform with readers and in SEO metrics. There is a demand for long form content.
Short form content pieces are great for covering an overview of the subject matter. Long form content is in-depth coverage of a topic or subject matter.
It requires research and analysis of your chosen topic.
Long form content doesn’t just take one form.
Whitepapers are one kind of long form content that marketers create.
This style of content is a very in-depth analysis of a subject complete with charts, graphs, and other visuals to tell the story. With many companies, this is a quite popular style of content.
Other popular types of long form content are pieces like listicles or how-to articles.
Infographics are also a popular style of long form content.
Long videos and webinars are also additional styles of long form content.
There are many examples of long form content available on the web. Here are some that stand out.
There are many reasons to incorporate long form content into your regular content creation strategy.
But the primary reason is that Google gives preference to longer pieces of content in its search algorithms.
You want to take whatever steps you can to boost your visibility with Google and other search engines. While there are many ways to find and drive paid traffic to your site, you still want to capture as much organic traffic on the internet that you can.
You never know which customer that sees your site will end up becoming a customer.
Organic traffic is free and you want to take advantage of that whenever you can.
Here are seven ways that long form content boosts your SEO rankings with Google:
You want visitors to spend as much time as possible on your website.
The longer a visitor stays, the better chance you have of that person taking some type of action.
Longer content will take longer for a person to consume and will contain more links to other pages on your site.
This strategy will help you meet your end goal of getting visitors to engage with your content and take the desired action. Long form content can triple the amount of time visitors spend on your site.
Does your website have all 10? Learn the secrets to driving more traffic to your website, generating more leads, and ultimately increasing sales.
As has already been mentioned, writing shorter content pieces is not as challenging as long form content is.
Shorter pieces don’t require the attention to detail or the amount of research that longer pieces require.
The more details your piece includes, the more you will appear as an expert in this field or on this subject.
Also, if you can consistently create and develop high quality long form content, you will be seen as an authority on the subject matter at hand.
Quality content will get plenty of likes and shares on social media. And as everyone knows, the more shares and likes your posts get, the larger the reach of your content.
To get your whitepapers, ebooks, and other forms of content in front of more people, you need that engagement on social media.
The more relevant your content is, the higher the engagement. The more engagement you get, the more shares you will get.
The benefit to longer content is that it should have a longer lifespan and be relevant for a longer duration.
The details and data that go into content of this length don’t change as often, depending upon the topic at hand and the subject matter.
This kind of content is called “evergreen content”.
This content is created in a way that makes it stay relevant and accurate for years to come. It is very smart to create content that still holds value years down the line.
This will also help you establish your authority in a field or subject matter area as well.
SERPs (search engine results page) are what appear at the top of a Google results page.
70% of searchers don’t go past the first webpage of search results.
So not only do you want to rank on the first page of Google, you want your SERP to appear at the top. This will get more visitors to your site and get more backlinks to your content.
Searchers assume that if your content is at the top of Google, you must be an expert.
One of the other great things about long form content is the chance to use your keywords more often.
You also have more space to incorporate in other primary keywords, secondary keywords, and long tail keywords. All of these will get your content more recognition from search engines.
The more search engines rank your content higher, the more visitors you will get to your site.
Just by its nature, long form content contains more information than shorter content would.
More details and information mean there are more reasons for someone to link to your content.
Backlinks are valuable in SEO strategy in multiple different ways.
The more long form content you create and put on your website, the better your chances are of being a backlink for someone else elsewhere on the web.
Does your website have all 10? Learn the secrets to driving more traffic to your website, generating more leads, and ultimately increasing sales.
While long form content performs well, it won’t work in every situation. You need to determine a few things before you start creating your content.
Knowing these things before you start will help you decide if long form or short form content is the better choice.
Writing a short blog is easy for a lot of marketers. But longer posts that start at 2000 words or more can be a challenge even for the best marketer.
Long form content does not always get the recognition it deserves as a key driver for SEO.
Proper creation and use of long form content can help increase everything from visitor engagement with your website to the number of times someone backlinks to your content.
All of these things will increase your authority on the subject matter and will lead to increased sales or another chosen engagement metric for your company.
Developing long form content doesn’t have to be complicated.
Set goals for your content and do your research so you can create pieces that are data driven, detail oriented and sprinkled with high performing keywords.
If you’re interested in creating long form content, but don’t have the time, money, or resources, contact our team to learn how we can help you out.
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