• Long form contents have a higher chance of social sharing (Source: Newswhip report)
• Long form contents inevitably lead to longer stay time of the user on the website (Source: Logic!)
• Long form contents have a better chance of getting a great SEO rank (Source: SerpIQ study)
• Long form contents will likely generate more leads (Source: Curata also SignalvsNoise)
• Long form contents outperform a series of shorter blog posts (Source: Problogger)
• Long form contents have a higher perceived authority of the author (Source: Wordstream and Kissmetrics)
• Long form contents cause longer and more engaging conversations (Source: quicksprout)
• Long form contents get more backlinks (Source: Moz report)

But as every belief needs to be evaluated regularly, the reasons behind credibility of the long form content has to be evaluated considering the ever-changing characteristics of the online world. Especially because search engines are not as blind as before.

In the first years of the introduction of the search concept, search engines were more a computation machine considering so many different content parameters such as content length, domain name, domain rank to find the most credible contents. Just check this list of 200 factors in Google ranking provided by Backlinko and separate the factors showing content characteristics from the factors related to the user behavior.

As in the internet old age, it was not so easy (or popular) to trace user behavior, a significant portion of the traditional SEO ranking parameters were related to the content itself, and the length of the content was surely of the most decisive factors in that paradigm. However, as Google and many other search engines have developed the huge human behavior databases, the relationship between content and the audience is a much precise factor in ranking the contents in comparison to the content characteristics itself.

Besides all the above facts, we should not forget that content creation for the sake of content creation or SEO for the sake of SEO is not justifiable in the current content-saturated world. What we need at the end of the day is conversion. We need profitable user action and the relationship between the content length, and the conversion (to the money and not just to the click) is not as straight as before.

So with all respect to David Ogilvy and his famous quote about long-form content, it seems that there are many other factors in choosing content length:

Use long form when you have a rich message

I’m talking about the rich messages, not important ones. Many important messages can be conveyed with a short sentence or small infographic. Your message is rich if you have so much relevant, useful, data which your audience is looking for and S(he) has to find it in other pages just after leaving your page or blog.

Here‘s a sample of not-so-rich content in long form. Even the best SEO rank would not make a serious conversion (subscription in this case) as the content is just long but not necessarily relevant and you feel that the author has made it deliberately and intentionally long just to bait clicks and hold you there.

Consider your subject and industry before deciding about content length

There are many reports (like Viperchill report) which show that the preferred or at least popular content length is highly dependent on the topic. Personal development articles are one of the longest ones and the readers of this category have got used to the long form. However you can’t expect that the reader of the political news be as patient as the reader of the personal development or financial blogs.

Think about your target audience

Statistics says that a longer content has a better chance of receiving a good SEO rank, Ceteris Paribas. But never ignore the last two words, Ceteris Paribas: with other things the same! This condition is not easily met! So, think about your target audience and their preferences. Demographic factors, interests and their previous knowledge can have a serious impact on their preferences about the content length and SEO rank is determined based on users preference and satisfaction more than any other factor.

What are you looking for?

Are you looking for SEO? for user engagement? Or user conversion? Are you looking for loyal users or accidental customers? Are you trying to collect user clicks or aiming to make your visitor delighted? Sometimes these targets do not overlap! Sometimes a short article can win search engines interest by so many happy visitors but a long article can engage a few visitors and leave the others unhappy and dissatisfied.

So, never decide on the content length blind and based on statistics. Statistics is always talking about the average people and average businesses and average contents. Sometimes we need to ignore them if we are not going to be ordinary!

The post Why you should create long form content? appeared first on webmindset.

It’s not easy to find a topic more controversial than usefulness and future of the longform content in the field of content strategy. But independent of these discussions, something is for sure: There’s nothing new under the sun. Longform content isn’t something new and has been existing long times before content marketers and content strategists.

You could trace the first longform contents back to the old papyrus letters written by ancient emperors and after the invention of the printing press, it got much easier to produce longform content in large scale for the public audience.

In the web age, even before the popularization of the longform concept, many bloggers like Stive Pavlina had real long articles (e.g. Introduction to the meaning of life). But after the popularization of the longform, you can see an uprising trend in the publication of longform content (Just take a look at this one!).

For years, authors chose between the shortform and longform based on the message they had and the level of elaboration the needed for communicating the concept. But SEO approach to the articles changed the way we look at the content length.

serpIQ reports are just one of the numerous reports published in recent years showing that the long articles have a better chance to be shown up as the top search results:

Longer stay time of the users on websites was the second reason for publishing longform articles as it can directly improve the traffic rank. Longform content got vast popularity for a couple of years, having these and many other technical reasons as support.

Therefore, for a long period, publishing longform content was the recommendation of SEO technicians independent of the real length of the message you had for your audience.

Spending a few minutes searching for the articles promoting or criticizing the longform, you will see the large portion of these articles is dedicated to the technical reasons and statistical reports. For example, as it is shown in the following diagram, the even variation of user preference to the content size is studied to find the optimum post length (measured as the necessary time for reading it).

Although still it’s possible to perform many other similar studies, we should not forget what we see in these statistical reports is more correlation than causation. It means there can be many different reasons for the positive correlation between length of the content and its rank for search engines or attractiveness for the audience that are overseen in this type of reports.

It seems we should take a deeper analysis to decide whether the longform content is suitable for our audience or not.

I have continued this topic in my other post titled why you should create long form content, But before, you may like to take a look at some of the excellent samples of the longform content I’ve seen on the web:

Firestorm (Guardian)

New York Time’s Riding the new Silk Road

Bond – License to drive (It’s a graphical longform content with virtually no text)

The post Longform Content, Definitions Examples, and Applications appeared first on webmindset.