A good content strategy is what SEO experts are after, and often prefer long form content. There are no definite rules as to whether long form or short form content brings more traffic. However, the answer can differ depending on various factors. Believing in the fact that your website or products will do better by putting out 2000-word-long content leads to misconceptions and can restrict you from making actual quality content. Every content serves a specific purpose; therefore, first, you must learn what type of content serves that purpose. We will further look into some factors that will clear out this debate or make it easier to understand.
Importance of Content in SEO
When it comes to making it to the top of Search engines, great quality content can help with that. Sometimes it’s not about the length of the content but it is the quality that matters. Content is anything that needs to be clearly expressed to the end-users to relay information for a specific purpose. Examples include eBooks, Guides, videos, case studies, infographics, and many more.
You need to make sure that your content is according to Google’s Algorithm and follows E-A-T, which indicates the site’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It means that your content needs to be informative and accurate.
Long Form Vs Short Form Content
Here, we will briefly explain the basic differences between both forms of content and what makes each better in different contexts.
What is Long Form Content?
It is a lengthy article that constitutes 1200 or more words. The longer copy lengths are mostly preferable for how-to guides, eBooks, white papers, case studies, and other similar content. Such write-up uses advanced content strategies and builds up a content pillar page with articles that explain everything in detail. However, higher word count does not always mean higher quality, and the need for higher word count might depend on the site’s nature as well.
What is Short Form Content?
On the other hand, short form content is a write-up of 1000 words or less. It includes short blog posts, media updates, infographics, and emails. This type of content attracts users who show their interest in short informative articles and are more likely to finish reading them from the beginning to the end. As compared to the long form of content, the short form has a great readability score.
Which Form of Content is Better?
In this section, we will take a look at which form of content is better and more preferred by search engines. We can answer this question in different ways. There is no definite answer as both long and short forms of content are effective when they are written in the right way according to Google’s algorithm and serve the purpose the content is written for.
Short-form content attracts more traffic, and if those users want to know more in detail, that is where they resort to long form content. You should also focus on the subject matter and decide which form of content is better in such a scenario. You can also make a mixture of short and long form content. It would like breaking the long content into several short form content where only specific information would be available.
Benefits of Writing Short Form Content
From a business point of view, short form content is preferable if you want to keep it consistent on your blog and keep posting regularly. It will help you maintain a good ranking and attract more users to the site. Short-form content is also less time-consuming and easier to create with such busy schedules. However, make sure to use the right traffic-driving strategies to make it a high-quality article, which depends on the topic of the article and the nature of a business site and its niche audience.
From the user’s point of view, it is better if factual information can be relayed in short form as it is less time-consuming to read. Internet users are most likely not to spend more time reading lengthy write-ups. Which makes short-form content the ultimate source for attracting more traffic to the site. It is also more likely to be shared on social media through links and reposts.
The important factor is to make sure the content aligns with the search intent and ranks up keywords. However, with short form write-ups, ranking up keywords can be hard. It also does not go into too much detail on the topic of concern.
Benefits of Long-Form Content
Long-form content is a write-up that contains exhaustively detailed information about the topic of concern. This type of content is both time-consuming to create and time-consuming for the readers to finish reading. Lengthy content is beneficial for your business if your SEO goal is to achieve conversions. The Google algorithm has proved to prefer long form content, especially when it meets the requirements of E-A-T and ranks up keywords that drive more traffic. Big content containing big data is more likely to rank up more keywords and link to another authoritative site. Therefore, the creators need to accumulate more link-worthy information to put them in one big content piece.
However, a downside of posting long form content is the short attention span of internet users. It is hard to keep them reading such a long piece of information and make it useful for them. Especially when the target audience already contains experts from the field, it must contain information useful enough not to waver their attention. Also, if you use Speed Writer to generate your content for the sake of making it lengthier to meet certain algorithms, then it is likely to backfire and get removed.
Conclusion
It all depends on the nature of your website and the purpose the content that it serves. Now that you know the difference between long-form and short-form content. You can decide which is preferable by the audience and which by the search engines. Quality will always matter more than the number of words. Whatever you put out should be informative and contain factual information to give the end users exactly what they are looking for.
