Understanding Long-Form Content

There is a Greater Depth

The first one is fairly obvious. Audiences like bigger pieces of work because they cover more of the topic in more depth and detail. You have a greater opportunity to offer a full and comprehensive answer and thus help audiences find a solution or fill a knowledge gap.

With depth and detail, you’re able to address more subtopics with nuance and offer greater insight with your first-hand knowledge.

Helps Them Navigate Through The Messy Middle

A purchase journey is not linear which is why Google has coined the term The Messy Middle to describe the evaluation and exploration phase that an average customer will go through before they are ready to purchase.

Opting to write in-depth gives you the chance to answer all the questions a customer may have and speed up this ‘messy’ process, ensuring a faster sale.

Trust between Consumers and Business Can Grow

Having long-form content that has depth and detail also imbibes a sense of trust between your brand and your customers.

You have the ability to engage them for longer and let them become more familiar with your brand and high level of knowledge. In a somewhat subconscious way, customers will trust a brand that has far-reaching work that is full of insight and depth as opposed to one that is surface-level.

Your Customer Doesn’t Need to Go Elsewhere

Your work can offer a complete solution to a person. Rather than having to visit three or four websites (some of which could be direct competitors, don’t forget) and piece together a full answer to fill their knowledge gap, they just go to one page, yours, learn everything they need and remember you for being the place where that happened.

Long-form Has a Longer Life-Span

Owing to the fact that long-form content covers more, the usefulness and lifespan are far greater than a flash-in-the-pan post that doesn’t attempt to go deep on an issue. Also, there is no bad time to publish longer work because it won’t date as quickly as lesser pieces. Provided the sections that are sensitive to dating are updated a user can land on this content a year, or more, after it has been published and still find it as useful as the day it was published.

1. Be Careful with Your Chosen Topic

As we’ve discussed, not all types of content need to be long-form. Terms that have high purchase intent or those that require a short answer aren’t going to need a definitive guide or an epic post. So, our first tip is to choose topics for long-form posts carefully.

Think about what you want out of your content, and don’t write for the sake of it. Beyond that, there are several material things you can do to find a topic that would benefit from a great deal of content. The first one is keyword research, find what your target audience is searching for and look for those broad keywords that indicate a knowledge gap that needs filling.

“You know your audience better than anyone, or at least you should do, so take time to harness that knowledge and think about what really makes them tick. Put yourself in their shoes – what would they want to know in order to be further persuaded to purchase your product or service?”, says Shona Worsman, our Lead Writer.

Looking at the content you already have is another good place to start. Look at your top-performing blogs, for example, and find the ones that perform well. Those that attract a lot of traffic could excel even further if they were optimised and flooded with new, enriching content.

And finally, if all that doesn’t yield a topic or two, see what your competitors are doing, view their in-depth content and long-form articles and do more. Create original content on the same topic and go one step beyond that and add in a whole host of E-E-A-T features, these unique elements will help you stand out.

2. Create Great Work or Work with Writers Who Can

When the time comes to writing your content you have two good options and plenty more bad ones.

Bad content can be fixed, it’s not like you have one shot to nail great content, however, it is strongly advised that you write, or get someone to write, the best work possible from the outset. Not only does it need to be well written, informative, and useful to the reader but they also need to be built with some essential SEO principles in mind.

So, you can either learn some search engine optimisation and merge that with your first-hand experience of your industry to create something that is packed with unique insight and depth (something that can take a great deal of time) or if you’re time-poor, there is another option.

The second good option is to hire really, really, talented writers who act as an extension of your marketing team to create, at scale, long-form work, baking SEO principles into the work from the outset.

On this, our Senior Content Editor Danielle says: “Ultimately, the goal is to create quality, which is a red line that can’t be skirted around. So if you have the time to create truly unique work that satisfies algorithms and search intent then great but if not, a team of content marketers is just a few clicks away.”

3. Keep the User Experience in Mind

It can be easy to get lost in the thick of writing and forget how your beautifully crafted article or guide will actually look to a user who has landed on your site.

The appearance and how easily navigable your work is as important as the words themselves.

“If your page is slow to load, littered with pop-ups or just looks boring then your bounce rate is just going to skyrocket because people haven’t been given a good experience,” says Adam Chapman, our Tech SEO.

When writing, think about your sections, the narrative arc, and how users will travel around the page. A table of contents is a great starting point as it gives users the ability to jump straight to the section that is most relevant to them, and leads to faster search intent satisfaction.

Additionally, consider what you want users to do once they’re on your page. You don’t want to miss out on opportunities to attain qualified leads. So, consider CTAS such as sign-up forms, email sign-ups, social media links, and links to other relevant content that keep these new, interested parties on your website.