4 Essential Benefits of Long-Form Content and How to Create it.
In 2019, Backlinko partnered with BuzzSumo to study 912 million blog posts. According to this study, posts longer than 3,000 words get 77.2% more backlinks (a link to/from another website).
From this study, there is solid data that long-form content is good for your website, but how do you create it? Many business owners are still confused about the best format for their blog posts.
In this post, we talk about long-form content, why it’s the best blogging format and how it can help you establish and engage a loyal audience. With the help of this post, you can succeed at generating long-form content.
The following points are covered:
How to create long-form content
The main advantages of long-form content
How to validate whether or not your post idea for a long-form piece is viable
Valuable tips from successful businesses who have created their long-form content
What Is Long-Form Content?
When you surf the internet for this term, you’ll find multiple definitions of what it means. However, the general idea of each of the separate definitions is the same: content or articles that are longer and more comprehensive than standard articles.
Some people consider articles longer than 700 words long-form, whereas others target articles over 1,800 words. However, the most general and widely used definition of long-term content is a piece of writing between 2,500–7,500 words.
People generally read long-form writings to deeply understand a subject. The fundamental defining characteristic of long-form content is that it’s in-depth—it addresses one topic thoroughly.
It explores all sides of an issue rather than tackling multiple topics or being brief. Long-form pieces also include research data or expert interviews, which aren’t typical for other content pieces.
We recommend websites use this format of writing to provide more valuable information to their readers, increase website traffic and increase the time a user dwells on a page. Long-form content helps businesses build authority, rank higher in search engine results, and establish a core audience.
Using Long-Form Content Can Benefit You in Many Ways!
Now that you know about long-form content, here are the advantages you can expect by creating it for your business blog.
Helps Business Leaders Shape Their Brand
Long-form content enables business leaders and CEOS to show their personality as they can express their thoughts, visions and plans for the business. This helps to improve their reputation among their employees and, in this way, strengthens the company. This attracts more customers and makes the business successful.
Better Search Engine Rankings
Longer writing pieces often rank higher in search results than articles with a low word count. You can boost your website traffic by improving your search result rankings because Google and many other search engines display in-depth, quality and up-to-date content higher.
A research team by serpIQ studied the average length of the content in the top 10 results of search queries. The company found that the top-ranked posts were over 2,000 words. There are two main reasons why this happens…
Firstly, your extended writing pieces may contain more keywords or keyword phrases that match the users’ search intent. Thus, Google will automatically suggest your content to the user. The more significant number of keywords will also inform the search engine that your content is high quality and meets users’ requirements.
Secondly, long-form content is more detailed and contains sufficient information. It includes all the necessary details of a single topic instead of focusing on brief overviews. Due to this, long-form content is considered more valuable, and search engines rank your higher-quality comprehensive content higher than shorter ones.
Check out our SEO blog posts.
Increase Dwell Time
Longer, in-depth, and more researched content means that people will be reading it for a longer time. This will increase the time spent by the users on your site.
The longer time visitors spend on your page before returning to SERPs, the higher the value your page delivers to the online users. This is why a high dwell time is good for your SEO.
A minute or two is a good dwell time because it indicates the page of content caters to the visitor’s interests and it’s likely the visitor consumed your content. This indicator signals to Google that your content is relevant and of quality.
Ultimately, your business can benefit as people will be more attracted to your brand and therefore are more likely to purchase from you.
Greater Social Media Recognition
Longer content gets more shares on social media than shorter content. More shares help your business reach a broader and newer audience. This is a great benefit of writing long-form content as it is crucial due to the increasing competition.
How to Create Long-Form Content
Here are some tips to help you write long-form content that appeals to your brand and target audience.
Get to Know Your Audience
You must spend time with your audience to create engaging, long-term content. Ask questions and talk about topics that affect them. Get in their shoes and figure out their problems and how can you solve them–write about it.
Listen to feedback from your followers and use it to determine future content creation. Ask them what they want to know!
Your followers can become a part of what you’re doing, so include them in your development process by asking for their opinions! This creates a bond between you and your audience – which helps keep people engaged with your brand even after reading your posts.
Be Consistent
Be patient and understand that developing meaningful connections takes time. Still, once you have established those connections with your audience, it will help drive engagement and loyalty over an extended period.
You may not see results immediately, but stick with it because it will pay off in the end! When you consistently put out high-quality content that matters to your target audience, they will come back for more! It can lead to positive word-of-mouth marketing and increased traffic if done correctly. The key here is consistency.
Keep Your Content Relevant
Make sure you track how much traffic each piece gets and make efforts to update older posts with new data or fresh ideas. Your current readers will love seeing their favorite pieces refreshed. At the same time, new visitors will appreciate being introduced to your evergreen posts.
Remember that most people won’t take action unless your idea inspires them—so make sure everything you write is shareable or applicable. It’s better to have one excellent post than five mediocre ones.
You want to produce SEO-optimized content so that you can attract traffic. Our SEO guide article How to Get Your SEO Started in 5 Easy Steps explains everything you need to know.
Create a Successful Promotion Strategy
Don’t rely on sheer luck for your blogs to be successful. If you want to create long-term content successfully, you will have to build a detailed, well-thought promotional strategy. A well-thought-out promotional strategy can be done in multiple ways.
For example, you can start by sending consistent emails to people who signed up for your newsletter on your website. You could also contact influencers asking them to collaborate on content. And feature your content on your company's homepage, because this is usually your top viewed page.
Long-form content can be the best way to promote your business because you can break down the content into a series. We use this strategy in our social media marketing too.
We typically write one long blog piece of content a month. From this content, we batch create and schedule social media posts to share for the entire month, eliminating the constant demanding stress of being on social media platforms every second of every day. We also share the content via email marketing and are consistent as humanly possible.
Hire an Expert
It so vital that you produce high-quality content; therefore, you should hire freelancers or experts to do your writing, web design and graphics rather than DIY. This may be an expensive investment, but it will pay off. Expert, high-quality, readable writing is the main difference between content that succeeds and fails.
Not convinced? Read the 4 Reasons to Hire a Professional Content Writer. Debating if you should DIY your website or hire a professional? Read our list of pros and cons to DIYing AND hiring a website designer to decide what to do. Confused about how to choose the best web professional for your work? Read the 25 Questions to Ask Your Website Designer Before Hiring.
Add Visuals to Your Content
Many readers believe long-form articles are just too many words to go through (use good headings to make content easier to scan). To make up for that, you should make your content visually appealing. Studies have proven that content with images has a higher chance of increasing engagement than content without images.
One way to add visual content to your piece of writing is by getting custom brand photography. We have a network of amazing photographers in the DC metro area if you need a referral get in touch. Eye-catching content will not only keep the reader engaged but will also help them gain a visual understanding.
It's good to be creative with your content; these little changes make quite a difference in how your audience views your content. Besides images, videos are another great option to transform your content into something more appealing.
That’s a Wrap!
To sum it up, long-form content is a potent tool that you can use to improve your business performance and website traffic. I cannot stress the importance of implementing long-form content in your content creation. If you want to improve your content, revive your website, or increase sales, long-form content is the perfect tool.
We hope this article helped you learn about long-form content and its benefits. We hope you start using this form of writing in your work to improve and succeed. Need some help? We’re here for you. Schedule a Call.
About the author: IVY ATTIE
Ivy is a content manager, researcher, and author in various visual media-oriented publications. She is a passionate communicator with a love for visual imagery, e-commerce, and digital marketing. Her background is in communication and journalism, and she also loves literature and performing arts.