Importance of Long-Form Content
Marketing, Web Design & Development
Having a website is all about attracting an audience. You want to get people to click on your website when searching and stay on your website. A website can have great and informational content but no audience. How do you solve this problem? Try adding long-form content.
Long-Form content may seem out of style in this tech savvy world but it is actually quite useful. There are many benefits to long-form content such as increasing chances of engaging the audiences by liking and sharing, giving an air of being an expert on the subject and people will more than likely come back to the site, and it also improves the website in the search engine results page.
To some, long-form content are just articles and pages that have over a 500-word count so it will be noticed by search engines. But, it is more complex than that. To optimize the benefits and value of long-form content, the word count should not be any less than 1,200 words for published content.
Long-form content is slowly rising in popularity. Just recently, it was suggested that digital long-form content was a bad idea. Media analysts said that reading long pages was not desired because of the short-attention spans people possess while on the internet. It was these opinions that made people want to stay away from long-form content. But it is being reanalyzed and people are realizing those opinions were overemphasized.
SEO Benefits
Every website's main goal is to get to the top of the search engine list. That means most will do anything to get to the top of the list. Well, what does it take to get to the top of the ranks? A study was conducted in 2012 to answer this question. The study was with 20,000 keywords and the average length on content on the pages. Here are the top 10 results.
The number one stop has an average content length of 2,450 words while the 10th position pages have around 400 less words on the page. Through this analyzed data, all highest ranked spots had over 2,300 word count.
Search Engine Algorithms
Search engines, in particular Google, have different algorithms that will put certain websites at the top. Having long-form content does not 100% guarantee your website to be #1 on every search engine but it will help your website a lot more than having fewer content.
Pandu Nayak, a Google employee, posted on the Google Webmasters Central Blog some insight on the benefits of long-form content. "Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users' daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. That's why today we're introducing new search results to help users find in-depth articles."
Social Media deals with sharing content and the more content there is, the more it will be shared. Long-form content outshines in the social media stand point. Another experiment was done with long-form content, but this time is was in regards to social media. Neil Patel wrote 327 blogs on Quick Sprout. They were split into two categories, blog posts that were fewer than 1,500 words and blog posts that were greater than 1,500 words. He analyzed the two groups based on how many likes on Facebook and twitter each group received. Here are the results.
"What follows is that if a post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than a post that is under 1,500 words. When you take into account that search engines take social signals into account when ranking sites, it reinforces why web pages with lengthier content rank higher."
Long-form content does have its benefits, but it is not always needed. Things like sharing a video does not need over 1,500 words of explanation on the video. Long-form content works best when it is needed. When there is informative content to write about and there are no spelling or grammar mistakes is when it will most beneficial. Having a keyword strategy and catching title will also help carry the long-form content.