Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles?

EliteWriter Level 3

July 2, 2016, 6:43 am

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Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles?

Long-form content is on average an article with about 1000words or more.
Long-form content can help to tackle the topic in more detail, since there is room for more words. Sometimes it also includes citations and quotes. However one needs to make sure that the keyword density is just right and to not fill up the content with fluff, or useless words that are not giving any valuable information. Long-form content is said to be rewarded by search engines.

So what do you think? Do you prefer such lengthy articles on a site or a blog, or would you rather opt for short articles?

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Lynne

When I first started content writing for my websites I thought a 300 word article would be sufficient, simply because that is what Yoast said to me. It took me another year to figure out that longer articles really do rank better.

You've made an excellent point about fluff though. I've read so many articles that are obviously just fluffed up to try and make it longer. I find it impossible to read an article like that and just leave the website... this will wreck your bounce rate,time on website, pages viewed and all these other little things that search engines use to rank your website too.

10 years ago

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idealmike

Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles?

Yes, absolutely I do. And yes, absolutely they are. In fact, it's been long proven now that longer articles outrank shorter ones. In that, there is direct correlation between longer articles ranking much higher than shorter ones. I personally believe that the longer the better! ;) But if you look at all the top ranking sites these days, especially those in the SEO and Internet Marketing niche, they have very very long articles. That's simply because they have so much to share about what they're talking about and sharing. You can say a lot more and go right into detail on things and even things related to the things you're writing about if you use a lot of words. Obviously you don't just want to add fluff and dribble to your content. Well, you might want a little bit just to fill in the blanks. I think of article writing or writing an article the same way as I do cooking and eating a good 3 piece meal. First you want your vegetables and then your potatoes and then your main meat. Often, an article is made up of several different meals, all with their own vegetables and potatoes and the main meat like. Also if your content is too short this can be susceptible to Google Panda sticking a thin content penalty on you. Also, longer content in general is much more newsworthy because it has much more to it that's interesting to read to anyone interested in that niche thing.

That's just my personal experience and thoughts on it but let's just look at what the SerpIQ data has to say.

As you can see from the bar chart, those with the top SERP positions have the longest content over those that have shorter content. This shows that the 10th position pages on average have much less words on the pages than those with 1st SERP positions. Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles? Yes, absolutely I do. And yes, absolutely they are. In fact, it's been long proven now that longer articles outrank shorter ones. In that, there is direct correlation between longer articles ranking much higher than shorter ones. I personally believe that the longer the better! ;) But if you look at all the top ranking sites these days, especially those in the SEO and Internet Marketing niche, they have very very long articles. That's simply because they have so much to share about what they're talking about and sharing. You can say a lot more and go right into detail on things and even things related to the things you're writing about if you use a lot of words. Obviously you don't just want to add fluff and dribble to your content. Well, you might want a little bit just to fill in the blanks. I think of article writing or writing an article the same way as I do cooking and eating a good 3 piece meal. First you want your vegetables and then your potatoes and then your main meat. Often, an article is made up of several different meals, all with their own vegetables and potatoes and the main meat like. Also if your content is too short this can be susceptible to Google Panda sticking a thin content penalty on you. Also, longer content in general is much more newsworthy because it has much more to it that's interesting to read to anyone interested in that niche thing. That's just my personal experience and thoughts on it but let's just look at what the [url=http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/][b]SerpIQ[/b][/url] data has to say. [url=https://www.seoclerks.com/files/user/images/Average-content-length-top-10-results.jpg][url=https://www.seoclerks.com/files/user/images/Average-content-length-top-10-results.jpg][img]https://www.seoclerks.com/files/user/images/Average-content-length-top-10-results.jpg[/img][/url][/url] As you can see from the bar chart, those with the top SERP positions have the longest content over those that have shorter content. This shows that the 10th position pages on average have much less words on the pages than those with 1st SERP positions.

10 years ago

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EliteWriter

That was really interesting and elucidates my point clearly. The main thing to consider is that the writing is interesting throughout, and this includes:

the need to be insightful / helpful / truly informative
that there is proper formatting, because as the article gets lengthy you are going to find several people who might give up reading it all when they see just a chunk of text. So adding bullet points, bold subheadings and some visual aids here and there are a few ways to make an article more visually appealing to those who are somewhat lazy as readers.

10 years ago

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vinaya

In my experience, contents should be of medium length. People have less attention span, therefore, they will never read your 1500 word articles. Likewise, short contents do not have enough informatiom and people will skip reading the short contents. Furthermore, search engines don't refer visitors to short contents.
My opinion is based on my writing for hubpages. On hubpages, I was asked to write 1500 word articles, however, I found that bounce rate for these articles was huge. By medium length, I mean contents around 700-800 words.

9 years ago

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Corzhens

In terms of readership, I think shorter articles have the advantage. Whenever I would encounter a long article, particularly in blogs, I would exit because I feel that I don’t have much time for it unless the subject is very interesting to me. I believe that shorter articles can get more traffic than longer articles. But I have to agree that longer articles have the advantage in terms of SEO compliance and also with monetization. The longer content, the better for the earnings.

8 years ago

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luv2xacosta

I think long form content is effective, because you can give more insights to the reader and as what you ave said, some citations, so it makes more believable and accurate when you try to convince the readers. Also it is a lot more formal as well.

7 years ago

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SEOClerks

Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles?

Do you think that long-form content is more effective than shorter articles?

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Lynne

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vinaya

Corzhens

luv2xacosta

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