Blogs are well known for being short, snappy and to the point. This type of content is mainly used to draw in your audience and increase website traffic. Often with shorter blogs, your content just doesn’t seem as fulfilling and you are constantly trying to cram in a lot much information on a budget of words that you want your audiences to consume.
We often hear that people keep their blogs to a minimum of 500 words but there is a place for blogs longer than 1,000 words, you just have to know when to use them, for example; how to blogs, information blogs on complex topics and other information topics which require a little more guidance.
Long form content actually gets better rankings in general than shorter blog articles – a study by Backlinko with longer content resulted in better rankings.
So, how do you write long formblogs while keeping your readers entertained? Here’s our top tips:
Head it up
Using headings is important because it will break down the whole article into bite size chunks, give it some order and make it more readable for your audience.
A tip here is to use ‘power words’ in your headlines which should give you more visibility on search engines too as it will pick up on your key words easier.
Use short URLs
It’s a well known fact that shorter URLs attract more clicks, but for some hard proof, a study by MarketingSherpa shows short URLs get clicked 2.5x as much as long URLs. Keep this in mind for all articles though and not just longform ones.
Engage visually
Use high-quality, relevant images alongside your content – it’s often not enough to tell people what they already know. You need to show them. Seigemedia produced a report which showed posts with high quality image received a phenomenal 121% more shares on Facebook.
There are lots of online tools you can use to make your content more aesthetically pleasing. If you have statistics to show, create an infographic on Canva– a free tool which helps you be creative with your content.
Use odd numbers
Readers are often looking for efficient ways of going about their business online – they want answers to questions now. Most of the time people look for logic in what they read (including numbered points) people can then skip through content not directly relevant to them for ease and quickness.
Headlines in general with numbers perform 36% better according to Backlinko.com and according to the same article, odd-numbered headlines have a 20% better click through rate (CTR) than headlines with even numbers.
If you want to know more about how digital content can positively impact your business get it touch here today.
