Here's Why Most Marketers Recommend Long-Form Content
They say that everyone has a novel inside them. It’s time for you to embrace your inner novelist because long-form content is hot. Writing in-depth content on subjects that you’re passionate about and that your readers will love is a great way to increase your traffic and boost your business.
Digital marketing gurus, including Neil Patel and Chris Brogan, have been advocating for long-form content. Once you get a handle on what it means to write long-form and how it can benefit your business, we reckon that you’ll be converted too.
In this post, we will show you the effectiveness of long-form content. And then we’ll take a look at how you can increase the length of your blog posts. We’ll show you how you can do it all without losing sleep or staying late at the office, illuminated by the glow of a solitary desk lamp.
What Is Long-Form Content?
Long-form content is not only about blog posts but includes such things as ebooks, whitepapers, and tutorials. The exact length that conforms to long-form varies. That’s a polite way of saying nobody knows, or at least there is much disagreement about that particular piece of string. Since it’s useful to have a frame of reference, however, when discussing long and short, let’s agree on a length for the purposes of this blog post.
According to Medium, the most successful articles, determined by the average time on page in relation to the post length and average reading speed, were around 1600 words. They calculated that these were seven-minute reads. We think you should aim for at least 2000 words. Don’t be afraid to push through 10,000 words if your topic and your post quality merit it. What you want to do is avoid the no man’s land between short-form content and long-form content.
What is Short-Form Content?
Short-form content tends to be considered content with 1200 words or fewer. This shorter content works best in situations where your audience already knows your brand, products, and services. It’s also frequently used in posts about products and services that are relatively inexpensive or easy to understand. Customers don’t need too much time to be persuaded by the benefits of products and services like these. They readily understand the ins and outs.
And note that short-form content doesn’t automatically mean you will be getting less engagement than you would with long-form content. If your short posts are compelling, high-quality, and matched to the needs of your audience, they should perform well.
Advantages of producing short blog posts include:
They are ideal for a demographic that tends to be busy and without much time to read.
It’s easier to be consistent when producing short-form content than when creating long-form content.
Since most searches take place on mobile devices, it makes sense for most businesses to include some short-form content.
While long articles tend to build engagement better than short ones, long pieces also take longer to write. That is if you write them yourself. You can get things done more quickly by using a blog writing team to handle some or all of your long-form content.
Avoid the Middle Ground
According to Kevin Delaney (editor-in-chief of Quartz, the business news site), articles between 500 to 800 words are the least likely to have success. 500 to 800 words is considered a news-friendly length. Many blogs stick to these parameters without considering the needs of their audience or the possibilities of other lengths. Delaney recommends going shorter to pick up visitors who want quick answers or longer for those who seek in-depth content.
Do People Read Long-Form Content?
Long-form content used to be considered a bad thing. The rise of the internet was expected to coincide with the demise of print journalism and our attention spans. You are living proof that this didn’t happen. Like many best practices for SEO, long-form content is good for people and search engines.
In the words of Google: “research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic.” For this reason, Google announced that it would introduce “new search results” to accommodate these needs. The implication is that long-form content will tend to rank well.
If this isn’t convincing you that people read long-form content, check out some stats that are in. Those who tended toward longer posts have been reaping the benefits. According to serpIQ in 2012, a study involving over 20,000 keywords showed that the top 10 results of search engine results pages had an average content length of over 2000 words.
Before creating long-form content, we urge you to think about your audience or customers. (In fact, before you do anything in your business, think about your customers). Some industries are better suited to long-form content than others. ViperChill, for example, used a random sampling of blog posts to show that posts on digital marketing topics tended to be around 1100 words on average. Personal development posts, however, veered towards 1500, while gadgets and gossip came in at under 200 words on average.
Consider what your current visitors respond to best. If your analytics show that they enjoy short, snappy articles the most, investing in long-form content might not be the best strategy for you.
Why is Long-Form Content Better?
There are so many reasons to go with long-form content that we think it’s worth going long-form to tell you about it. Here are some reasons that most marketers are recommending long-form content.
Appears more expert – When you go in-depth on a topic, you demonstrate how much you know or how much expertise your business can provide. You’re giving yourself more room to show off your skills, which is fine if you’re providing valuable content that people enjoy and can use. Anyone can answer a question with a one-liner, but it takes an expert to create in-depth content and sustain a reader’s interest.
Leads to more engagement – Providing your content is high-quality and not just long, the fact that people are spending more time on your site means that they are finding your content valuable. the time they spend on your site before clicking away suggests the value of your website, and Google is paying attention. When people spend longer on your site, they also have an opportunity to interact with more elements, see more ads, and be enticed by other offers and calls-to-action you may have available.
Encourages sharing – A collaboration between Noah Kagan and BuzzSumo highlighted the fact that blog posts between 3000 and 10,000 words got the maximum social shares. Long-form content tends to be more in-depth and therefore tends to be more valuable when it comes to offering users’ solutions to their problems. The more valuable or interesting your post, the more likely it is that someone will share it with their network.
Lead to better SERP ranking – high-quality content is more valuable, shareable, and leads to higher engagement. This is highly likely to lead to a better ranking on search engine results pages. And guess what? A better ranking on SERPs should lead to more traffic, even more shares, and even more engagement.
Seems more authoritative – the authority on a subject tends not to be the person who shuts down a conversation in 500 words or fewer, but opens up the issue and explores every aspect, pushing boundaries. Given two speakers on the same subject, who would seem to be the most authoritative? The guy who dries up after sixty seconds and glances at his watch, or the woman who can keep you on the edge of your seat and make everyone in the room lose track of time?
Earns better brand awareness – More long-form content gives your content more weight. Through storytelling posts and engaging, authentic writing, you can help readers connect with your brand. One of the simplest reasons for this is that you have more words with which to mention your brand. Nobody is advocating a return to keyword stuffing, but it’s a fact that longer articles can contain more of your keywords, including your brand name. This is particularly useful when those keywords are focused on one in-depth topic.
Receives more backlinks on average – Other websites are more likely to link to your blog if you are providing something of value. More backlinks improve your ranking. According to Moz, there is a correlation between content length and how many backlinks websites acquire.
Source: Content, Shares and Links
Source: Content, Shares and Links
Gives you more free material – People love free stuff. Providing long-form content, therefore, is a great way to attract visitors. It makes your brand more attractive and can boost visitors’ perception of you since merely interacting with your brand gives them value.
It helps you stand out - it takes more time to create long-form content than short-form content. That means that your competitors may not be doing it. Writing long-form content is an excellent way to stand out in a crowded industry or marketplace.
Gives you content you can repurpose – having created content in long-form, you will have plenty of material to use to make offer forms of content. Doing so can help you reach out to other areas, such as different social media platforms. Or you can create different blog types to attract and engage visitors. Long-Form content can be a great source of material for infographics, whitepapers, and more, to keep your site varied and interesting. And you make your investment in long-form content reach further.
If you’re getting a good amount of traffic from search engines, but little else, long-form content can boost return traffic, direct traffic, brand searches, and user engagement. One piece of stellar long-form content gives you something to promote. You can use ads to direct people to your long-form content to increase traffic, boost engagement, and generate leads, all the while knowing that shareable content can give you significant ROI.
Long-form content is particularly useful when you’re targeting people in the early stages of the buyer’s journey or if you are asking for something significant from the customer. Something significant might be your customer’s time, energy, or money. You should also consider long-form content if you are launching something new, technical, or complex to the market. It provides you with the opportunity to fully explain the benefits of what you do or make to your audience.
Inspirational businessman David Ogilvy, considered the godfather of modern advertising, is renowned for speaking about the power of long-form content over short-form. It consistently outperforms short content because it is more weighty and seems more important. In the case of posts that talk about products, they take more time to talk about product benefits and to display the facts that help visitors become customers.
Encouraging to see that long-form content perfoms best - What Analyzing 100 Million Articles Taught Us. http://t.co/Z671UNRQVy
— Brad Smith (@BSmarketer) April 24, 2014
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
How Do You Create Long-Form Content?
Remember that not all content should be long-form content. Short and snappy sometimes wins the race. The content type you choose should be appropriate for you, your subject matter, and your audience. While you can’t always check all three of those boxes, these are the things to consider.
Once you’ve decided to create long-form content:
Define your objectives - Start with your customer’s needs, work out how you intend to satisfy them, and consider how you will measure success.
Choose a topic - What topics will resonate with your audience and generate engagement.
Research:
Your audience – creating long-form content is an investment of your time and energy, so it’s worth taking extra time to make sure you’re about to create something that your audience will enjoy or that it will solve a problem they have.
Search queries and keywords – examining keywords and search engines’ queries is an excellent source of ideas for long-form content. Google’s autofill feature will help you figure out the things your customers are interested in by suggesting them to you as you type into the search box and providing you with “people also ask” suggestions and related searches. Google is king when it comes to knowing what users are searching for, so this should factor into your research.
Your best-performing blog posts – If you have blog posts with visits, time spent, and/or conversions that stand out from the others, this is an excellent guide to what your visitors like! Creating more on similar lines or updating an existing article to make it longer can be beneficial. Be careful not to repeat content but to use existing content as a guide to what subjects and styles do best.
Your competition – Can you do better than the best-performing posts by your competitors? Analyze your competition’s best posts and see where you have more to add or a new take on the issue. If you can provide a more authoritative, comprehensive answer, you have a chance of ranking better than them for those keywords or that subject. If you have an alternative viewpoint on the topic, this can be an excellent starting point for your article.
Don’t pad - Creating long-form content is not the same as adding fluff to a short article. On the contrary, this is blog post suicide. The combination of long-form content and low-quality will inevitably damage your brand. Viewers can tell the difference between lean, but in-depth content versus posts that are all flab and filler. You can revisit old posts and lengthen your posts, but you need to add meaningful, quality content, not just additional words.
Your blog post should be as long as it needs to be, no shorter and no longer - Make sure to ask yourself why your 2000-word post merits 2000 words? Good candidates for long-form content include an in-depth case study that sets the scene for the solutions a company provides and brings it to life for readers, or posts that answer swathes of related questions on a topic, clearly organized via subheadings. You can use a long-form blog post to take your readers on a journey through time, through the life of your product and its development. Or explore the history of your company. Whatever the reason for the length, make sure the quality of the content merits it.
Hone your storytelling skills - Consider making your post so good that it’s compelling even for people who are not interested in your industry. One way to do this is to focus on the human element. We’re not all marketers, or manufacturers, or politicians, but we’re all people. Write about issues that affect people. Write about your customers or employees. Write about emotions, and problems, and overcoming those challenges. By not overdoing it with brand mentions or keywords, you can create a compelling work that has longevity and demonstrates the values of your brand without overselling it. To make your content especially engaging, remember to show not tell.
Use sub-headings to make your long-form content dynamic - In this way, long-form content does not miss out on views from those with limited time or limited attention spans. You create a long-form post that people can scan to get to the information they want.
Use images - Images don’t just break up a long-form blog post. They can deepen its quality. By using high-quality images that say more than words, you can create compelling content that is shareable and great for your branding.
Use interactive content - Include audio files and video to make your long-form content more engaging. If your subject is particularly complex or technical, using interactive content becomes especially useful. By doing so, you’ll also be giving your audience more choice about how they interact with your brand.
Writing a listicle can be a good path to writing long-form content - A 2000-word post on favorite holiday destinations might sound daunting. It becomes easier, however, when you break it up into 20 subheaders of 100 words each for your post on The 20 Best Holiday Destinations. Like it or loathe it, listicles are great for generating scannable, accessible, long-form content.
Don’t forget about SEO - Long-form content gives you more opportunities to use your primary keywords and long-tail keywords naturally. When you’ve finished your first draft, be sure to go through it again with an eye on your keyword density. See if you’ve made the most of natural opportunities to get focused keywords into one post.
Make the content as long as it needs to be - When starting with long-form content, you may be concerned about meeting a minimum word count. With practice, however, you’ll find a groove. You’ll be pushing the upper “limits” of blog length without too much trouble. Don’t be limited by the numbers. If you have enough steam to fill 4000 words, write 4000 words. The blog post should be as long as it needs to be. Written well, it will be compelling and shareable.
Link to your other articles on related topics – Long-form content gives you plenty of chance to cover a subject comprehensively, but that doesn’t mean it will always cover every area. Doing so is not necessarily appropriate. If your post doesn’t cover certain areas of a topic, redirect your visitors with some well-placed links to your other content. Long-form content should give you many opportunities to send your visitors elsewhere on your site. This will increase the amount of time they spend on your website and improve your ranking and engagement.
Decide whether you will collect emails in return for the content - Neil Patel of Quick Sprout recommends freely accessible content (ungated) over content that requires an email (gated) because of the long-term benefits of having content that is open and shareable. Many companies find that a balance that leans slightly heavily on gated content converts best.
Don’t forget to promote your content – A rule of thumb suggests that you should spend at least as much time promoting your content as you spend writing it. Minimum. Consider ads, influencers, email updates, social media, and featuring your content update on your home page to give your long-form content a push.
Remember your digital marketing toolkit - Introducing or boosting the amount of long-form content on your website tends to be an excellent way to increase traffic, engagement, and brand awareness. It’s particularly effective as part of a wider strategy, so remember and use other tactics at the same time as introducing longer blog posts
If the idea of writing long-form content is intimidating, you’re not alone. There’s a vast difference between a 500-word post and a 5000-word ebook. This is not to say that a 500-word blog post is easy, but that they require different skills.
You might benefit from having a professional writer or two spin your straw outlines into gold. Your writing skills will get better with practice. If you don’t feel ready to tackle an epic post right now, or you’ve tried and it seems to fall flat, hiring some professionals can help you achieve your objectives without stress or bleeding from your fingertips.
It’s also worth noting that writing one long-form post every few months is not likely to have a significant effect on your site ranking. The idea is to create this high-quality content consistently, which, of course, makes it more challenging, more unusual, and more valuable. This is why some companies get in some help. It’s one thing to write and publish long-form content, but another to do it over and over again, on schedule, to build trust and satisfy your audience.
For assistance with long-form content, order blog posts from the website. Get in touch with us via our contact form. Keep it short. (Just kidding). And if you have a colleague trying to achieve more engagement without time, skills, or experience, please let him or her know about this blog post. Our professional writing services offer you long-form content that can leave your competition in the shadows and help your business reach its potential.
