Writing longer content takes more time and it requires a much more in depth understanding of the topic, but it has a huge variety of benefits, one of which being that it leads to higher conversions. It goes against much of today’s more standardized advice about content. Just about every article will tell you that today’s consumer is impatient. They do not want to read a thousand words of content about anything. And while that’s not necessarily true, it has led most brands to revert to producing shorter content that can be easily digested.
Shorter content is also easier to produce. When you are only writing four hundred words about something, you don’t have to know as much about that thing. It’s easier to churn out on a regular basis. There’s a huge difference between writing two thousand words a day and writing four hundred words a day. But does shorter content, that is supposedly more digestible and more approachable for the average reader turn more of those readers into customers?
According to the statistics, not at all. Everyone is focusing on shorter content and that means that the market is completely saturated with these short, bite-sized pieces of content that, in the long run, don’t really provide you with that much information. Imagine only being able to use four hundred words to describe a complicated process or opinion about your industry. You’d have to seriously water down what you want to say—and there’s nothing attractive about that to the average customer.
If you want to turn more of your visitors into customers, longer content might just be the perfect way.
Take a Look at Google
If you just look at Google’s numbers, you can see that it favors longer content. The average length of content that shows up in the top ten results is over 2000 words. Content that ranks in the top two slots is, on average, over 2450 words. As you move down the list to the third, fourth, fifth, and beyond slots, you will see that the word count decreases.
What can be inferred from this data is that longer content performs better on search engines that shorter content does. You will see a significant difference in how well a piece of content that is over two thousand words performs and how well one that is under two thousand words performs. Right now, the sweet spot seems to be in between two thousand and 2,500 words.
There is, of course, a reason that Google prefers this type of content. Longer content is more in-depth and more informative than shorter content. A piece of content that is two thousand words is obviously going to be much more detailed than content that is under four hundred words. Because Google’s purpose is to present their searchers with the most relevant and useful information, they will choose longer, more detailed content over shorter, watered down content.
Does this mean that you should stretch a topic that really only warrants four hundred words out to two thousand? No. It does mean, however, that if you can write two thousand words or more about a topic, you should.
Sites with a Lot of Content Get More Links
The more content you have, the more links you are going to get on your content. Why? This goes back to value, again. A piece that is longer is likely to be more valuable than a piece that is shorter, so more people will naturally want to link to it. This is great for publicizing your content and it is also great for search engine ranking, as Google takes a close look at how many backlinks there are to a piece of content when deciding where in the search results it should be listed.
According to the model that is most commonly accepted today, shorter content should get more links, because it takes less time to read, but this is simply not what the numbers show. In fact, the numbers show the exact opposite, that the longer the content is, the more valuable it is perceived to be, and the more likely someone is to link back to that content.
Longer Content Gets More Interaction
How many likes and comments your content gets is a good measure of how engaged people are when they read that content. Across just about every social media, content is shared more when it is longer. Even on Twitter, where you would expect most people to want the shortest, most bite-sized content, content that is between three thousand and ten thousand words performs much better than content that is less than one thousand words. Content in this same range does better on Pinterest, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and on Google+.
In fact, there is no social media where it is better to write fewer words. It is important to mention, here, that you should not fluff up a piece simply to get it to some arbitrarily long word count. You should not force a piece to be three thousand words when far fewer words should do. If your content is overly repetitive, if it is boring, or it covers irrelevant facts, people are not going to read it. Content is only going to perform well if it is, in the first place, engaging and interesting.
The Bottom Line
Longer content is better for conversions in so many ways. First of all, it gets more people to your site. The longer the content is, the higher it is likely to be ranked in relevant search results, which means more people will click on it. If more people click on it, more people will engage with it, and more people will naturally be converted into clients or customers. If your main purpose of writing content is to rank well on search engines and drive more traffic to your website, longer content can help you do that.
But longer content is also simply more likely to be engaged with, which makes it the ideal way to present information that is actually going to convince people to become your customer or client. If you want people to actually read what you have to say, longer content might actually be the way to go. It’s better for the reader, not just better for search engines.
It’s also the best way to get your readers to share your content more often. Because longer content gets more shares on every single social media, it is a much better medium for getting your readers to become your marketers. If you write informative, engaging, long form content, they are going to want to share it with other people—not just on platforms you would expect like LinkedIn, but all across social media.
This is not an excuse to write long, rambling posts that are devoid of useful information. It is an excuse to stop limiting yourself to four hundred words when what you want to say could be much better said in a longer post.
Writing longer content takes more time and it requires a much more in depth understanding of the topic, but it has a huge variety of benefits, one of which being that it leads to higher conversions. It goes against much of today’s more standardized advice about content. Just about every article will tell you that today’s consumer is impatient. They do not want to read a thousand words of content about anything. And while that’s not necessarily true, it has led most brands to revert to producing shorter content that can be easily digested.
Shorter content is also easier to produce. When you are only writing four hundred words about something, you don’t have to know as much about that thing. It’s easier to churn out on a regular basis. There’s a huge difference between writing two thousand words a day and writing four hundred words a day. But does shorter content, that is supposedly more digestible and more approachable for the average reader turn more of those readers into customers?
According to the statistics, not at all. Everyone is focusing on shorter content and that means that the market is completely saturated with these short, bite-sized pieces of content that, in the long run, don’t really provide you with that much information. Imagine only being able to use four hundred words to describe a complicated process or opinion about your industry. You’d have to seriously water down what you want to say—and there’s nothing attractive about that to the average customer.
If you want to turn more of your visitors into customers, longer content might just be the perfect way.
Take a Look at Google
If you just look at Google’s numbers, you can see that it favors longer content. The average length of content that shows up in the top ten results is over 2000 words. Content that ranks in the top two slots is, on average, over 2450 words. As you move down the list to the third, fourth, fifth, and beyond slots, you will see that the word count decreases.
What can be inferred from this data is that longer content performs better on search engines that shorter content does. You will see a significant difference in how well a piece of content that is over two thousand words performs and how well one that is under two thousand words performs. Right now, the sweet spot seems to be in between two thousand and 2,500 words.
There is, of course, a reason that Google prefers this type of content. Longer content is more in-depth and more informative than shorter content. A piece of content that is two thousand words is obviously going to be much more detailed than content that is under four hundred words. Because Google’s purpose is to present their searchers with the most relevant and useful information, they will choose longer, more detailed content over shorter, watered down content.
Does this mean that you should stretch a topic that really only warrants four hundred words out to two thousand? No. It does mean, however, that if you can write two thousand words or more about a topic, you should.
Sites with a Lot of Content Get More Links
The more content you have, the more links you are going to get on your content. Why? This goes back to value, again. A piece that is longer is likely to be more valuable than a piece that is shorter, so more people will naturally want to link to it. This is great for publicizing your content and it is also great for search engine ranking, as Google takes a close look at how many backlinks there are to a piece of content when deciding where in the search results it should be listed.
According to the model that is most commonly accepted today, shorter content should get more links, because it takes less time to read, but this is simply not what the numbers show. In fact, the numbers show the exact opposite, that the longer the content is, the more valuable it is perceived to be, and the more likely someone is to link back to that content.
Longer Content Gets More Interaction
How many likes and comments your content gets is a good measure of how engaged people are when they read that content. Across just about every social media, content is shared more when it is longer. Even on Twitter, where you would expect most people to want the shortest, most bite-sized content, content that is between three thousand and ten thousand words performs much better than content that is less than one thousand words. Content in this same range does better on Pinterest, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and on Google+.
In fact, there is no social media where it is better to write fewer words. It is important to mention, here, that you should not fluff up a piece simply to get it to some arbitrarily long word count. You should not force a piece to be three thousand words when far fewer words should do. If your content is overly repetitive, if it is boring, or it covers irrelevant facts, people are not going to read it. Content is only going to perform well if it is, in the first place, engaging and interesting.
The Bottom Line
Longer content is better for conversions in so many ways. First of all, it gets more people to your site. The longer the content is, the higher it is likely to be ranked in relevant search results, which means more people will click on it. If more people click on it, more people will engage with it, and more people will naturally be converted into clients or customers. If your main purpose of writing content is to rank well on search engines and drive more traffic to your website, longer content can help you do that.
But longer content is also simply more likely to be engaged with, which makes it the ideal way to present information that is actually going to convince people to become your customer or client. If you want people to actually read what you have to say, longer content might actually be the way to go. It’s better for the reader, not just better for search engines.
It’s also the best way to get your readers to share your content more often. Because longer content gets more shares on every single social media, it is a much better medium for getting your readers to become your marketers. If you write informative, engaging, long form content, they are going to want to share it with other people—not just on platforms you would expect like LinkedIn, but all across social media.
This is not an excuse to write long, rambling posts that are devoid of useful information. It is an excuse to stop limiting yourself to four hundred words when what you want to say could be much better said in a longer post.
Published on November 7, 2016
About the Author: Chris Williams
