The mantra ‘Content is King’ has not changed but the desired length of the content may have. Google understands how easy it is for webmasters to slap together a 400-word blog post and then optimize it for a keyword or two. Google is looking for and rewarding sites with meatier content. They want to see ‘long form ‘content. Long form content is well-written, blog posts with a minimum of 1000 words.
If your site is not ranking as well as you’d like, and your content is comprised of mostly short, generic articles, it may be time to add some more comprehensive content, including some longer posts, e-books, guides and whitepapers.
Long-form content isn’t just rewarded by the search engines – but with readers too. If your content is well written and actually helpful, guess what? You’ll begin to notice people are spending more time on your site, more sharing on social media sites, and more page views in your web analytic reports. That’s all good news.
This year when it comes to search engine marketing and search engine optimization the focus seems to be quality over quantity – and many think it’s about time. To demonstrate the point, check out these reports and studies that talk about the pros and cons of long form content.
In the article What Is Long-Form Content and Why Does It Work? by Dan Shewan in Wordstream Blog he says, “Our average piece of content was around 1,000 words or fewer. We focused heavily on SEO, including keyword optimization. The only problem with this strategy? We were getting a lot of search traffic, but not a lot of return traffic, direct traffic, or brand searches, and our user engagement metrics – stuff like bounce rate and time on site – were pretty low.
So we switched up our tactics a bit and started incorporating more long-form articles into our content strategy. The goal was to increase user engagement – and it worked extraordinarily well.”
In the Forbes article, Why Long Form Content Marketing Works, And Why It Doesn’t, written by contributor Joshua Steimle, he believes there are benefits to both depending on the desired outcome. Short form content is best to quickly convey a message with striking, visual content. For certain blogs and sites, posting short content multiple times per day proved to generate large amounts of organic search traffic in a short period of time. But if signups and long-term relationships is your goal, then long form content is more effective.
Another opinion by Quartz editor, Kevin Delaney, is that articles should ideally be either less than 500 words or 1,200 words or more, and to stay away from the traditional 700 word article. He says,” Online news outlets should focus on short, sharable posts and long in-depth features,” and “”People read short, fast content on the web and also long-form, analytical pieces. Articles of between 500 and 800 words are too long to be sharable, and too short to be in-depth.”
Confused? Well, you’re not alone. Opinions vary, but one thing remains consistent. Whether you choose long form, short form, or a combination of both, quality content is what gets shared and leads to conversions. Continue to post well written and interesting content. It’s like the Field of Dreams quote, “If you build it, he will come.”