Is online advertising a zero-sum game?
I was struck recently by a wonderfully succinct article from Seth Godin. For those of you unfamiliar with Seth, his daily email is always thought
April 15, 2024
Getting confused with your content? There are many different types of content that you can use to promote your business including video, written and audio content, to name a few. Written content can be found across the entirety of many websites, but which type of written content is best? Discover the difference between long-form and short-form content from the expert writers and SEO experts at Aqueous Digital.
Long-form content refers to any piece of written content that is between 1,000-7,500 words. While the exact length of long-form content Tis debated, content over 1,000 words is often classed as long-form. Typically used to give the reader an in-depth understanding of a particular topic, these longer pieces of content are ideal for unpicking complicated subjects. The purpose of long-form content is therefore incredibly informative.
An example of long-form content actually includes this article! At just over 1,000 words, there’s plenty of information in this piece of written content to help you wrap your head around both long-form and short-form content. However, long-form content can contain thousands and thousands of words and can include academic essays, buying guides and much more.
If you’re wondering whether the length of your written content really matters, you might be surprised to discover that it does! According to results from SEMrush’s The State of Marketing 2020 Global Report, long-form content that was composed of more than 3,000 words generated 21% more traffic, 24% more shares and an incredible 75% more backlinks that articles at just a third of the length.
According to statistics collated by Pew Research Centre, people do read long-form content! In fact, while both types of content (short-form and long-form content) receive roughly the same number of visitors, readers actually spend more than twice as much time digesting pieces of written content that contain more than 1,000 words.
As a result, not only is long-form content a useful source of detailed information for your potential customers, but it comes with many added advantages for your business, such as an increase in traffic and more backlinks. These factors can also help Google and other search engines to rank your content and web pages higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than shorter content created by your competitors, ensuring your content is viewed first.
In contrast to long-form content, short-form content refers to any written content that has fewer than 1,000 words. Easy to absorb in a just a few minutes (or even a matter of seconds!), this type of written content is best suited to conveying simple ideas or answering straightforward questions.
Short-form content is useful for both businesses and their online audience. While short-form content is quick and easy for business to both create and share across the various platforms (such as LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook), their online audience also benefits from the quick absorption of important information.
In a world where you can ask ‘Alexa’ a question and receive a comprehensive answer almost immediately, you might imagine that people want short and snappy answers to all their enquiries. While this scannable content might be ideal in some instances, short-form content is unlikely to have the same impact or persuasive argument as the longer alternative. Plus, we’re curious creatures, so it typically doesn’t harm to have more information than we need readily available.
Regardless of whether you’re a business or a customer, long-form content is almost always more effective than the short-form alternative. Benefits of long-form content for an online business includes everything from an increase in backlinks, shares and the number of visitors to your website (traffic) to higher conversion rates and even better SEO performance.
Customers or search engine users searching for an answer to the enquiry, on the other hand, benefit from the significant amount of information that’s included in long-form content. Even if they’re only searching for a quick answer to their query, Google is often able to highlight and thereby draw attention to the most relevant information to help provide them with a quick answer to their question.
From here, the searcher can choose whether to continue reading the relevant helpful information surrounding the topic within the long-form content or navigate away from the page. Businesses can also struggle to see results from short-form content because there is less opportunity to include keywords and backlinks.
If you’d like expert advice when it comes to crafting an exceptional content strategy or optimising your current collection of content, why not reach out to the helpful team of SEO experts at Aqueous Digital? Collectively, we have decades of experiencing helping businesses to reach their full potential with a helping hand from SEO.
Specialising in both paid and organic search, content and reputation management, we have the skills, expertise and experienced marketing staff to cater to businesses of all shapes and sizes, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch today! To discover how we can support your business goals, please feel free to get in contact with our friendly and highly-knowledgeable Liverpool team.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways that you can get in touch with our team regardless of whether it’s within opening hours, over the phone or via email. To speak to a member of our team over the phone, please feel free to give us a call on 0800 285 1424. Alternatively, you can also contact us via email at agency@aqueous-digital.co.uk or submit your enquiry online using our convenient online contact form.
Upon receiving your enquiry, we’ll ensure that one of our approachable team members give you a call back to discuss your content query or SEO requirements in more detail. If you love the way we work and want to find out more, we’ll be more than happy to provide you with a free website health check and a no-obligation consultation to highlight how we could help – we hope to hear from you soon!
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