While there is no official minimum length for blog posts, several analytical studies show that those who write long-form content get a higher conversion rate than those who produce short ones.
According to HubSpot, articles with at least 2,250-2,500 words get the most traffic. In a separate analysis, Brian Dean believes that Google favors long-form content and as some kind of evidence, most of the top-ranking content on Google’s search results have at least 1,890 words.
But even if the results are promising, many content writers and bloggers still find writing long-form content very challenging. 44% of companies already find the content production process as it is to be the most challenging when marketing content.
What most of these companies and content writers often miss is taking into consideration the primary factors contributing to effective content.
These are the top considerations for every long-form content writing:
- Target audience – what sort of blog content can address the concerns of your target audience?
- Branding – how do you want your customers to see you?
- SEO – are all aspects of the blog content optimized?
- Link building – is there a strategic plan for internal linking and backlinking?
These were put simply, but you get the point: long-form content must be purposive and strategic.
How to Ensure Purposive and Strategic Long-Form Content
How do you ensure that your long-form content is purposive and strategic?
What are the specific qualities of purposive and long-form content and how can you benefit from these specific qualities?
Well, here are some of the qualities you can find in most long-form content published out there.
Comprehensiveness
Long content is written comprehensively to ensure that it’s not only filled with flowery words, but it actually discusses a topic in detail, covering every possible subtopic.
If an article has to be lengthy, it has to be useful all throughout. Otherwise, your readers will generalize all of your content to be lacking in thought and simply clickbaity. You want to make sure that your article contains the right words and provides a great deal of information about a point of view, research, a feature, or a story.
Write useful, long-form content—not just any lengthy content. Google will find out anyway if your content is indeed relevant to a query or not through the quality of engagement your content gets. Once it does find out, you’re going to lose the post’s ranking chances.
Evergreen
Not all long-form content is evergreen content. What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content refers to the type of content that never goes out of date. The information shared on evergreen content is easily upgradeable so it can be refreshed or updated every now and then without causing repercussions.
Writing long-form content can require a significant amount of time and effort so you want to maximize its value by turning it into evergreen content. Doing so will also help you repurpose the long-form content into several content pieces for different social platforms.
How to Write Long-Form Content
Generating topic ideas is only one of the challenges in creating content. Another challenge is writing long-form content that makes sense to your target audience.
Varying techniques work for various people. However, there are definitive tips that can help you write better long-form content.
Check out the following tips for writing long-form content:
1. Research Thoroughly
Only write if you have a first-hand experience of a topic, or if you have thoroughly conducted your own research.
There’s only so much you could say in any written piece. In fact, you can send a message across with just a few words. However, people do not only read articles because they want to hear you out. They read because they have questions that need answers.
Whether you are an expert on a topic or not, it’s important that you conduct research thoroughly.
Tip: Look for trends, statistics, quotes, and other relevant data that you can add.
2. Create an Outline
There are writers who could never start an article unless they create an outline first.
This is one of the most popular techniques in content creation. Outlines are highly beneficial because they do not only provide your article a framework but also guides you through what content to include.
The ideal outline must contain the heading suggestions that can help you plan ahead content sections and transitions which are all essential during researching and even during content writing.
3. Use Headings
Since it’s going to be lengthy content, it’s important that you use headings to organize the information you would be sharing.
Headings show the structuring of thoughts and provide a better way to show which part of the post talks about a specific idea. Most readers would prefer to scan than read an article’s every word. You also want to cater to this type of readers because they still consume information, but in a lesser time than most.
Aside from organizing your ideas, headings can also have an impact on SEO. Yoast often suggests that you include the keyphrase you’re targeting to rank for. They would suggest that headings also include these keywords or keyphrases.
4. Write Original Content
It’s possible to get tempted and copy existing content sections, if not the entire thing.
You’d probably think you can get away with writing duplicate content because you’ll be writing long articles anyway. But, you must note that there are now several ways or tools in detecting plagiarism.
Write original content. Practice if you must so you can get better at it and write more confidently. If the problem is getting the motivation to write quality and lengthy content, then you can look for motivation first. Then get back to produce your long-form content.
5. Add Visual Content
You can add videos or images to further enhance the readability of your content.
Your visual content may enhance your long-form content as well as make your article seem longer than it is.
Also, you can turn your post into an infographic that you can add as an attachment to your post. Videos or images are shareable online so there’s a possibility for you to gain backlinks or referral traffic from these source platforms.
No matter what type of blog you are writing for, visual content can provide you with something more to talk about in the blog so you can expand your long-form content with ease.