From budding startups to large corporations, everyone is betting on long-form content to ace lead generation. But, putting together a few long paragraphs of a blog and hitting the ‘publish button is not content marketing. There is more depth in it.
Many factors contribute to content success. Usually, its size plays an important role. Long-form content or content that is up to 2,000 words in size is generally able to perform better than short-form content. That’s the benefit of creating informative, in-depth, long-form content.
In this era of a short attention span, it may seem counter-intuitive to champion long-form content for marketing and PR. In recent years, data has shown its effectiveness. Longer content such as books, white papers, podcasts, e-books, and videos may take more time and effort than shorter bites, demand more depth and creativity, and are very effective. Here are the 7 SEO benefits of using long-form content on your brand’s website.
SEO Benefits of Long-form Content For Marketers
1. Higher Online Visibility through better Search Engine Ranking
SerpIQ conducted a study on the correlation between post length and search engine ranking. The study revealed interesting facts, such as the search ranking position changed with the length of the content. Content-length posts above 2,000 words quickly rank at the top. The graph below from SerpIQ establishes that:
Secondly, a well-known publishing brand, Quartz, emphasizes publishing long-term content. They believe that long-term content establishes the brand as a thought leader or subject matter expert. This kind of brand reputation adds to the credibility of the content, bringing in more organic traffic; An underlying purpose of content marketing.
2. Long-form Content increases Search Engine Crawling
Long-format content provides opportunities for a more comprehensive text that includes optimized keywords and phrases, more thorough schema markup implementation, and more backlinks. Accordingly, properly written and optimized long-format pieces contain high-quality content that can increase shares, clicks, and traffic to website pages. The more well-optimized information your brand’s website pages provide, the more readable and attractive your website pages are to both consumers and search engines.
3. Long-form content is Indexed more Precisely on Google
Studies show that the first page of Google search rankings is dominated by long-form content. SerpIQ’s research on the top 10 search results for more than 10,000 keywords showed that the first-ranked Google search result contained an average of 2416 words, and the 10th-ranked result contained an average of 2032 words.
Backlinko also found in its study that pages with longer content consistently rank better than pages with shorter content.
The length of these pages is no coincidence. Google’s search engine algorithms consistently prioritize content with a long word count. The trend of short-to-long-form content is driven by a desire to take advantage of it. If you do not include some lengthy pieces of your site, you miss out on a potential increase in your ranking.
However, Google isn’t promoting content based solely on its word count, in the same way, that cramming in extra keywords doesn’t work. The driving factor in Google’s rankings today can be simplified to page authority and user experience. Longer word counts provide more opportunities to generate the signals that search engine algorithms use to measure these two metrics.
4. Longer Content means Visitors will Spend more time on your Website
You want visitants to spend as much time as possible on your website. The longer a visitor stays there, the better chance you have of that person taking some sort of action.
It will take longer for a person to consume longer content and contain more links to other pages on your site.
This strategy will help you accomplish your ultimate goal of engaging visitors to your content and taking the desired action. Long-format content can triple the time visitors spend on your site.
5. Brand Authority
Writing long, clear, and concise content about your brand increases the brand authority level in the market. It produces more traffic flow to the site so that people can learn more about the topic.
The more content, the more search traffic will flow to your website. The content should be more informative and evergreen in order to stay up-to-date as well. A shallow and fabricated material will result in a bounce-back failure.
6. Improves Social Media Sharing
One of the great things about long-format content is that it contains many links to external articles published on the Internet. These links aid the link-building efforts of the publishers who have published the interlinked articles. To boost their linking efforts, they share the original article on social media.
Also, lengthy content rich in detailed analysis or information prompts people to share it. There is a higher chance that people will share something on social media that they find helpful or relatable. In addition, almost every blog post has social buttons, which again provide the facility to link and share the post. This further increases the viral spread of the article, thereby facilitating content marketing.
Moz, the search engine giant, researched more than a million articles and found that “long-term content consistently gets high average shares and significantly higher average links.”
7. Long-form Content Improves Voice Search Ranking
Voice search is making a significant impact in search online marketing this year and is changing the way consumers interact with online content. Because voice command searches are designed to be more interactive than type searches, the content on website pages must also be more interactive and easy to read, so that search engines will find it relevant to specific voice command searches. Longer content provides this opportunity to provide more consolidated information conversationally.
Conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, longer content will get you more of what you want from your blog – more visibility, better engagement and social shares, more backlinks (which means a higher ranking in SERPs), and most of all. Increasingly, it will make your audience begin to see you as the ultimate authority in your industry.