No matter how many new marketing techniques evolve online, the content will always take the central stage. How will search engines and users come to know what you want to convey? It’s only with the content. Let it be stories, podcasts, or video content changes its form.
Now, what’s the scenario about articles, stories, or blogs? When a writer wants to cover a topic from different perspectives and angles, it results in long-form content. One may argue, short-form content is equally good. What is the need to create such long content? But it is not the reality. Long-form content better addresses the curiosity of readers.
We’ll cover this in detail in upcoming sections.
What is long-form content?
Before proceeding further, it is essential to know what long-form content is. Content with more than 2400 words is long-form content. On the other hand, text with over 500 to 1200 words is short-form content.
Search engine ranks long-form content higher as it takes a focused and comprehensive approach to write these many words. When word count starts increasing after 1200 words, it requires more research, better visuals, and more customer engagement to bind users.
What is the relevance of long-form content to rank in search results?
A single topic covered in detail is far better than a combination of issues. With this, the reader will get every possible to it in a single go. There are several advantages of long-form content from an SEO point of view. Let’s see which one are those:
Help you earn more backlinks
Why will someone provide citations or references to your content? It’s only when they find it relevant. It is far easier to write a short piece of information with minimal experience and research. However, it takes energy, time, and effort to produce a comprehensive long-form article.
Also, if content marketing experts adopt a 360-degree approach to creating content with industry-related information, it invites more backlinks. Marketers can outreach authority and resource links for quality backlinks. And they prefer long-form content to mention your link on their site.
More organic potential traffic
Organic potential traffic is of utmost importance for bearing maximum ROI. Long-form content is an indicator of better user experience and satisfaction. It brings quality visitors to the top of the marketing funnel.
Well, the game starts with more click-through ratio (CTR). When search engine bots discover people spending more time on the website, its indexability improves. With the improved online appearance, genuine traffic increases exponentially.
Improves conversion ratio
Furthermore, long-form is influential in hitting the bull’s eye. Customers find the products or services relevant to their concern areas. Automatically, they hit the purchase button or other conversion items. It leads to an increase in conversion rate to a large extent.
Get more social engagement
Long-form content is a social sharing machine. Teeny-tiny orbit size doesn’t attract much social engagement. On the other hand, a well-established is a storehouse of followers, comments, customer reviews. The reason behind this is people find it useful for their near and dear ones, partners, clients, or professional networks.
Better SERP rankings
How does a search engine work? Crawlers use algorithms to calculate user behavior parameters, votes outside the website, backlinks, CTR, bounce rate, and the number of pages visited per session.
It decides your search engine rankings. Indeed, long-form content that delivers high value gets much more SERP rankings than its shorter version.
Tips for writing Long-form content
Quality over quantity
Quality and quantity are on the opposite side of the shore. Some marketers consider preferring quantity over quality for long-form content. But, it’s of no worth. In this battle, short-form content tends to beat long-form content without any problem. So, make sure of delivery quality for better rankings.
Research can change the ranking game.
Now, writing is only the result. The soul lies in research. Renowned writers spent hours together to create worthy content. Otherwise, it is just a scrap piece of information. Thus, research and effective presentation can take your SERP position to a different level.
Create relevant, related, and keyword-focused text
What does relevancy mean? The text must be up-to-date, valid in the current niche situation, and as per industry standards. Next comes LSI keywords that take you towards related content. It invites industry-wide clients towards you.
Then, keyword-focused, you may jot down text without keyword research. But, it is more like throwing the arrow without any target. Keyword focus brings out long-form content considering search intent, competitive analysis, and customer’s requirements.
Conclusion
In short, long-form content increases the average “time spent on page” by users. It indicates to search engines that the information you’re providing is credible and relevant. With this, indexability improves, which enhances your SERP rankings. Also, it earns you more online visibility with a content paragraph appearing in featured snippets by Google.