Blog

People have become busier than ever, and with their attention spans getting shorter; marketers and business owners have long ago been warned against posting long content. It has been a general rule of thumb to produce content that’s concise and clear; otherwise they may risk losing their audience.

 

 

Given this situation, is it wise for business owners to give their audience long-form content? According to experts, the answer depends on how you’re able to utilize the long-form content. Nevertheless, long-form content can provide surprising benefits to a website, one of them is better brand authority.

 

 

A lot of experts tried to give their own definition of long-form content. The general consensus, however, is that a post that merely attempts to breach the 500-word mark just to make search engines notice their content is not a long-form content. Most experts also peg long-form content to be around 1,200 to 2,000 words of written content, or roughly longer than a 30-second TV ad and a one-page magazine add.

 

Years ago, marketers tended to avoid publishing long-form content. Analysts feared that people’s attention spans started to shrivel, and they will begin to look not only for short content, but snappy content that gives them everything they need to know at once. It was not until recently, however, that a renewed interest for long-form content, and its benefits for a website’s SEO, began to resurface.

 

 

In a serp IQ study conducted in 2012, which involved more than 20,000 keywords, they found that the average word count of each of the top ten results had more than 2,000 words, with the content on the top spot having 2,416. Furthermore, though the actual benefits to SEO haven’t been established yet, the Google Webmasters Central Blog hinted that the search engine prefers long-form content.

 

According to Pandu Nayak, creator of the Panda algorithm update, they found that 10 percent of their users’ daily information “involves learning about a broad topic.” Many marketing experts found improvements to their web traffic upon publishing this type of content.

 

 

As enticing as these results are, this does not mean that long-form content should be published everyday. As content marketing expert Bill Belew explains, this type of content should only be used judiciously, and under the right circumstances.

 

First, businesses should realize that they are writing for themselves and begin creating a framework that can help them tell great stories. This can be achieved with help from SEO companies in Indianapolis, like MyNetWire.