Long form vs. short form content
- Long form content is generally more than 2500 words and short form content is around 800-1000 words.
- Long form content is descriptive, authoritative and well researched and short form content is brief and normally, doesn’t cover the topic in its entirety.
- Long form content takes effort and time whereas short form content can be published in quick successions.
Do I recommend long form content or short form content?
A healthy mix of both. There is a reason.
As mentioned in the above bulleted list, long form content takes time and effort. Below I am going to explain what are the overwhelming advantages of publishing long form content on an ongoing basis, but you should maintain a balance between publishing longer pieces of content and shorter content pieces so that you have authoritative content as well as regular content.
Of course, if you have a dedicated team of multiple content writers you can publish many long form blog posts and web pages even in a single day, but if you have just one content writer (or if you write yourself) it may take a few days, even a week, to write a descriptive, well-researched, authoritative long form blog post.
Irrespective of their great benefits, one of the drawbacks of solely focusing on long form blog posts and web pages is that the frequency of publishing may be curtailed.
This is why I suggest maintaining a balance. While your longer blog post is being created, for regular updates, keep on publishing short content so that the search engine crawlers crawl your website or blog regularly.
What if you need to make a choice? Long form blog posts, without a doubt.
He’s a good infographic on the importance of publishing longform content. As usual, when I link to external infographics I just post the topmost portion and then link to the original image, and I’m doing the same here.
Infographic link on the importance of longform content
Why you cannot ignore long form content if you’re serious about improving your SEO?
If you bet highly on your search engine rankings then you must be doing lots of reading on what sort of content ranks higher on search engines, and if you prefer to keep yourself abreast with the latest, you must have come across a term called “long form content”.
Google it seems, loves longish, research-based articles and blog posts, possibly spanning multiple pages. This is called long form content.
Such content, presumably, takes lots of effort and time to come into existence, and hence, by the virtue of being difficult to create, earns ranking points from Google.
Aside from multi-page blog posts and articles, other examples of long form content are
- E-books
- FAQs
- White papers and case studies
- Interviews
- Reviews
- Conference or webinars scripts
Short form content on the other hand consists of blog posts, articles and web pages that are less than or equal to 1000 words. You can also have case studies, interviews, reviews and FAQs that a less than 1000 words – it basically depends on what you have to say.
Do people even read long form content? Or do they prefer short form content?
As a content writer who writes engaging content that helps my clients improve their conversion rate, I say it with difficulty that it isn’t always necessary that people read your long form content. At least not in a single reading.
They may bookmark your blog post or web page for later reading.
Having said that, it differs from business to business. B2B customers and clients are known to read a lot because a lot is at stake. For example, if you are about to spend thousands of dollars on a product or a service, the least you can do is spend a couple of hours reading about that product or service or one of its features.
What are the benefits of publishing long form content?
Long form content improves your SEO
Of course, the immediate benefit of publishing long form content is that it immediately begins to improve your search engine rankings.
There is a SerpIQ study that showed that longer blog posts enjoy higher search engine rankings compared to shorter blog posts.
Longer blog posts get higher search engine rankings
Why does long form content improve your SEO?
It’s very logical. What is Google looking for when it ranks content? High-quality content that provides all the information a search engine user is looking for.
Do you think Google just randomly ranks blog posts, web pages and articles? No. Everything is very methodical and even mathematical.
Although it takes many factors into account before it decides to rank a particular link higher, one of the most important aspects is the usefulness of your content. Most important: does it have the information the user is looking for?
Please note: if this blog post appears to end abruptly, I would like to let you know that I’m currently updating it.