As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake.
Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.
When done well, short, simple content is great.
When done badly, it results in poor content. This content is either too thin to be worth reading. Or, it appears to target an audience who has just finished reading a very simple children’s book.
Blogger lore suggests writing content simply. However, several reasons exist to add longer-form content for educated adults. SEO and content marketing both provide these reasons. In fact, including this type of content can noticeably benefit corporate blogs and websites.
Greater Keyword Potential
It’s often beneficial to include a keyphrase and various synonyms in a post. With short content, cramming as many variations as possible in can lead to stilted, unnatural articles that are unpleasant to read. Long form content naturally lends itself to multiple variations on a theme.
It needn’t even be deliberate. As content grows longer, in an effort to avoid repetition, it becomes necessary to mix up the vocabulary, capturing a bunch of extra long tail keywords in a way which is also favorable stylistically.
Demonstrate Intelligence and Knowledge
Producing well-written, long-form content is the best way to show your intelligence. It shows that you are informed and capable. You can understand and create complex arguments relevant to your field.
Of course, short articles highlighting benefits or offering concise insights are fine. However, sometimes people require evidence of original thought. They want to see more than just the apparent regurgitation of others’ conclusions.
Increased Ranking
There’s some evidence that longer content produces increased search engine rankings. Last year, SerpIQ conducted a study that showed that over the SERP results for 20,000 keywords, on average the top 10 results included textual content in excess of 2000 words.
In line with that finding there is also evidence that longer content tends to attract more links than shorter articles.
Increased Conversions
This one is a little less clear-cut. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that long-form content on a page leads to a greater conversion rate. While you should always conduct your own split testing,
QuickSprout’s testing of their pages found interesting results. Specifically, a version exceeding 1000 words produced a 7% higher conversion rate than one with only 400 words.
You shouldn’t take all this as encouragement to artificially inflate content with unnecessary fluff. Sometimes articles are short for good reason, but it should lead SEOs and content marketers to reconsider their hesitation to produce rich, long, well-crafted and argued pieces of content that will educate and encourage widespread sharing.
