You don’t have to work in digital marketing to know that the Internet never stops changing. Google has radically shifted its content ranking guidelines over the past three years, with names like Google Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird dominating algorithm updates.
The advent of these algorithm updates has led to a corresponding rise in certain aspects of content, which were once ignored and irrelevant to rankings, being repeatedly favored in ranking trends. This trend has led to the following changes:
- Short content has given way to long content
- Readability of content and quality of research have overtaken the once-almighty keyword
- Blogs heavy on visual impact with an emphasis on formatting are shared, often going viral
Why is it that long content is being featured on the results pages over short, sharp content?
Long Content
In order to compare long content to its shorter brethren, we must have a working understanding of what defines long content.
When we talk about long, or cornerstone, content, we’re making reference to writing that displays depth of thought and research. Not unlike the academic essays written by schoolchildren and university students around the world, long content depends on demonstrable facts and information. The variety of styles in which long content comes actually mirrors the proliferation of literary forms or genres, with the tone of each article or blog post varying depending on the sort of company, brand, or business behind it. As a general rule, long content adopts a casual style that is at once informal and informative. In fact, long content pieces 2,000 to 2,500 words in length have been some of the most successful at optimizing search engine results.
Should You Go Long, or Go Short?
The trend right now is for quality content to be highly ranked. This trend started to build up some steam in 2013 when, according to SearchMetrics.com, the average word count of highly ranked text was 576, far ahead of the average word count in 2012. In fact, the steady increase in word count persisted well into 2014.
QuickSprout.com’s Neil Patel took it upon himself to run a little experiment about long content when he created a test homepage of 1,300 words and pitted it against one boasting a paltry 500 words, each with a fill-out form rounding out the bottom of the page. His initial hypothesis was that the longer content would negatively affect his conversion rate, but Patel actually found the opposite.
- The conversion rate of the long content stood head and shoulders above the short with a 7.6% margin of victory.
- The long content sprouted leads of higher quality than the short content.
- The long content invigorated both conversions and SERPs.
Patel’s conclusion, in the end, was that longer content far outstrips short content for both rankings and engagements in the current digital landscape.
What Does This Mean for You?
Of course, the greatest risk of long content is that it can be boring and overly verbose, which will alienate casual readers and destroy your rankings. In fact, coming up with quality long content is actually the single greatest hurdle standing between businesses and maximum rankings and conversions.
The crux of the issue here is that SEO, rather than dying off, is changing. Content geared toward keyword searches and traffic is no longer successful. That’s why SearchEngineLand.com actually published a list of eight ways to create what they’ve named long tail content for search engine optimization. The outlook now focuses on the user and the quality of content. Here are some ways to go about successful content creation:
- Create a crack team to come up with ideas. You need to put together a veritable Justice League (or group of Avengers, if you’re a Marvel fan) of your most creative thinkers. You know the type. They’re always coming up with sharp, brilliant ideas, and you need to get them in a room together to brainstorm on content ideas. Once creativity has a foot, or even a toe, in the door, you can start your research.
- Identify what your audience needs. Figure out what the top five, or the top ten, needs are for your audience. As a team, brainstorm some topics that address each need, offering solutions in the form of long, informative content that’s been properly researched. Once you’ve identified what your audience craves, you’ll be cranking out pieces regularly going over two thousand words in length that can either be cut down to size or separated to form two disparate, but fantastic, pieces of writing.
- Offer them more. Once you’ve provided a solution to your audience’s needs, do some research on products and services that complement those that you’re offering. Although this reeks of non-productivity, it actually builds your unique, credible, authoritative voice by pointing your audience in the direction of alternate solutions. You won’t offer every potential solution to a problem, so providing extra solutions lends your content a sense of integrity. Upon seeing this kind of behavior, users start to think of your business as the sort that puts their clients ahead of their bottom line. This is a classic small-business technique for establishing customer loyalty, translated to the digital marketplace to optimize your sales conversion.
- Know what you’re up against. Have a look at the competition so you know how to outdo them. But don’t steal their strategies or copy their content, because you always need to ensure that your content is original and creative.
What Does This Mean for Short Content?
When it comes to short content, its value is a matter of how, where, and when to use it. Despite the benefits of long content, short content shouldn’t be retired by any means, as it’s still a viable avenue for digital marketing. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be plastered in every corner of the Internet. In all likelihood, you’ll write some short content today. Short content still reigns supreme when it comes to:
- Descriptions attached to products
- Social media, such as Facebook posts and Twitter tweets
- Web seminars, also known as “webinars”
- Infographics
- Podcasting
- Video and other multimedia presentations
- Narrowly focused marketing content, like emails
These days, people have short attention spans, with very little free time to boot. So, even though the audience sees the merit in reading high-quality long content, short content like this is still valuable.
The long-versus-short debate can really be boiled down to those two warring factions: attention-starved short readers, and quality-seeking long readers. While we once swore by short articles and shorter content, seeing it work wonders as we shot continuous messages to the audience, today there are people who simply want more; despite having a shorter attention span and less time available, our audiences still want to read long, articulate, thoughtful content. Google has responded by digging in its heels and getting behind long content.
Over the next few years, SEO will continue to morph and change, as will the trends pertaining to long and short content.
