Post length isn’t everything – but it helps, especially if you want your content to be referenced by others around the web. In my personal experience, short blog articles are not performing well in the SERPs.
When working for a major UK brand I did a research to establish the correlation between page ranking and a number of words present on the page and I’ve noticed that Google just doesn’t like pages with short-form content. It almost felt like pages with not enough content are completely ignored by Google.
With that being said there are of course exceptions like the Seth Godin’s website but as we all know there are no rules set in stone when it comes to Google.
For the record: I would never criticise a business for publishing shorter articles as long as they are able to communicate their message in a short format.
Longer articles succeed not necessarily because of the number of words they contain, but the amount of insight, keywords, data and research they contain. Put simply, if you want people to link and retweet your blog articles, your content needs to be helpful – and a longer article gives you the space to go into detail.
Put simply, if you want people to link and retweet your blog articles, your content needs to be helpful – and a longer article gives you the space to go into detail.
Some points when writing an article:
Substance – What are you trying to say?
Audience – Do you know your audience? Your end goal is to create content your audience is going to read. Do not write for the search engines. Write for your future customers.
Frequency – if more frequent you can get away with shorter articles. Don’t ever sacrifice quality for frequency.
Images – The Internet nowadays is full of words. Trillions of them. However, it’s not the words that normally gets all your attention – it is usually the images. You can get the entire mood of something that you’re about to read just passing the preview image.
Before moving to the next one a bit of interesting statistic. “In an online store, customers think that the quality of a product’s image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%).:
The facts speak for themselves.
Format – The format of your articles has a massive impact on its readability. It is massively important to break your content with subheadings, images, and short paragraphs so people can scan it.
Your company blog is the perfect tool for providing your audience with a look at the “human” side of your organisation as well as showcasing the fun and cool things you do in the community.
Fine tune your headline. Your headline can literally make or break your blog article (and for that matter landing page or even email). To optimise your headline from an SEO point of view place the keyword as near to the front of the headline as possible. My formula for crafting headlines for list posts would be:
[number] [keyword] [curiosity/inquisitiveness capturing phrase]
You’ve got less than a second to capture your audience’s attention in the SERPs. Make your headline structure count.
You’ve got no choice but to become your own PR agency. Once you hit the “Publish” button on your fresh article you should really tweet your heart out. Acting as your own PR agency start linking to your content from all over the internet – from comments on blogs linking back to your article to submitting your article on Medium or LinkedIn. Remember that publishing an article is only job half done. No one will come, tweet or share your masterpiece if they don’t know about it. Social media management and web content writing go hand-in-hand so don’t be shy and go out there and spread the word.
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