Want to keep your visitors engaged? Then learning how to create outstanding long-form content is essential.
What is Long-Form Content?
Long-form content offers an in-depth look at a specific topic.
It differs from short form content like standard blogs and social media posts. It should be well-researched and provide the needed context to deepen the reader’s understanding of a given subject. Long-form content is about substance, well-researched and evidenced by someone who knows the topic.
When it comes to length there’s no hard and fast rules. Generally, however, long-form content is between 700-2000 words.
Examples of long-form content include detailed articles, eBooks, reports, and white papers.
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The Benefits of Long-Form Content
So, why should you be interested in creating long-form content for your WordPress website?
Boost SEO and Conversion Rates
In a world where we’re told our attention spans are getting shorter, you might be surprised to learn that long-form content is incredibly popular with search engines.
That’s because search engines love context, and detailed long-form content provides just that.
By having long-form content on your WordPress website, you increase your chances of improving your search engine rankings.
Increase Social Media Engagement
Long-form content is a great tool for increasing social media engagement.
Well researched, substantial information is ripe for sharing across different social media platforms.
Increase Time Spent On Site
If your long-form content is engaging, it will increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website.
People will be less likely to bounce if they’re engrossed in an engaging long-form article, and more time spent on a site inspires more trust.
3 Steps to Create Long-Form Content
So, now you know the benefits of crafting long-form content, how can you make your content the best? Here are 3 tips to improve your long-form content.
1. Include Visual Elements
While there are merits to long-form content, having big blocks of text is never a good idea, and it’s rarely visually appealing.
Mixing visual content into high-quality, thoughtful articles transforms your text into awesome, mentally-engaging reading experiences.
Research has shown at adding images or visual infographics every about one hundred pages usually makes the content more sharable. The word count is important, and the graphics need to be colorful and attractive, but the content still needs to be readable.
2. Optimize for Search Engines
Long-form content can be great for improving your search engine results page rankings, but you also need to put in the work too.
Long-form content adds tons of content to your website. This content should be optimized with keywords to help bring more customers to your pages.
There are plenty of tools out there to help you optimize your content, including our very own SEO Keyword Hound that will help you to identify the best keyword opportunities that your competitor’s are missing.
3. Use Online Tools
There are also tools that built to help you improve your content, so take advantage of them.
One of these tools is Grammarly, which makes the writing process smoother and smarter. It’s actually an extension for Chrome web browsers. Simply install it and it proofreads as you type to fix mistakes in real-time.
You could also consider using a table of contents to organize your content as well. Your visitors will have an easier time finding the content they are looking for, or so they can jump to a specific section of a long-form article instead of just scrolling.
You can also use WordPress themes or hosting which are designed to help showcase longer content more effectively.
Conclusion
Long-form articles are more than just massive word walls. Subheadings, visual elements, and easy navigation are all distinguishing features of long-form content.
Longer content is ideal for two reasons: SEO and organic traffic. Creating excellent content will bring people to your website without the need for paid ads or help. The content speaks for itself.
There is a strong correlation between word count and organic rankings. The articles need to be long, but they don’t need to be difficult to read or boring. Add visuals, research, quotes, and more to make it an appealing read.
The tips in this article are a few good ways to create or repurpose your long-form content to so you can increase your overall reach. The key is to make the changes and consistently change content. Don’t expect massive changes overnight, but they will happen.
