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What Is a Long-Form Content/Article And How Should It Be Written? Do You Need To Include It In Your Content Strategy?
Find Out All The Details On The PMI Blog.
The long-form was cleared in 2016 by a study that later became historic. An analysis of one million search results found that longer content tended to rank higher in search results. What does the study teach? That the full content significantly outweighed the superficial content.
There is therefore a correlation between the length of the content and its positioning, which is why it is important to understand what a long-form is, how it should be written and why it is important to include it in your strategy.
What Is a Long-Form
There are actually several definitions to explain what a long-form is. Some people define articles longer than 700 words as “long-form”, while other schools of thought believe that an article must exceed 1,800 words to be defined as such. For reasons of argument, we tend to standardize the concept of long-form with articles of about 1200 words or more.
In a nutshell, the long-form is simply a well-written article and of the length necessary to thoroughly investigate a topic that stands out from short-form content.
The Advantages Of a Long-Form
There are at least five benefits to be gained when publishing a quality long-form article:
- It positions you as an expert in that subject, becoming a topic of interest to your customers and potential customers. When people have a question about a topic, they tend to turn to experts (in this case you)
- Longer posts rank higher on search engines and are therefore more visible online
- People are more likely to engage with long-form content, so they will spend more time on your site. If you then include relevant internal links within the content, they are likely to view more pages. This behavior has a positive impact on indexing
- Longer pieces get more social shares. There are several studies and statistics that confirm this
- More comprehensive content gets more inbound links, and these links play a central role in indexing
To Write Long-Form Content
Once you understand what a long-form is and all the benefits it can bring to your company website or blog, it’s time to figure out how to write it.
Choose The Right Topic
It is crucial to choose a topic of interest to your audience. Talk to your team and try to understand what customers want, check your analytics to see which posts have performed well in the past, and use Google Trends and related searches to gather more ideas. Do keyword research to get more information on what people are trying to find. Make sure your idea isn’t too general and try to figure out if you can write about it without boring.
Beat The Competition
You don’t have to create content that is better than anything else you can find on the web: you just “create” content that is better than your competitors’. Do you want to get feedback and become relevant? The only solution is to beat the competition. To do this, you need study, competition analysis, and text optimization.
Collect Information Strategically
Depending on the topic, you can collect information in multiple ways:
- Talk to customers about their needs
- Talk to your team members about customer needs
- Collect customer testimonials and reviews
- Propose polls
- Use Google Analytics to discover trends
- Study what your competitors say on the subject
Quality long-form content is therefore a mix of information gathered through primary sources (original interviews, surveys, studies) and secondary sources (what has already been published).
Pay Attention To The Details
It’s often the details that make the difference – don’t forget to use lots of subtitles for people who need to analyze the content and read only a few sections. Optimize the article and tags in a way that reads naturally, carefully correct any errors and make sure all links work.
What is the most compelling title? Use external tools to find out which types of headlines have worked well for the type of post you are writing. Ideally, a title should contain a keyword often used by your audience.
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