The quick answer so I don’t keep you waiting is yes, and it matters a lot. Over the last couple years, we have seen many articles published with some very convincing data on why we should all be writing longer content. All arrived at basically the same point, longer content leads to more likely ranking on the 1st page for any particular keyword. Meaning if there are options for Google to choose for a particular keyword the pages with more content tend to be the ones on page one. How much content? Depending on the research report a low of 1500 and a high of about 2400 in word count was what was recommended. I provide some links at the bottom to some of these writings if you are interested in reading them yourselves.
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The idea that longer content ranked better than shorter content isn’t entirely a new concept . Terms like “thin†& “light†content have been around for a while. As a WordPress user and use one of the most common SEO plugins, Yoast they have classified “thin†content as anything under 300 words for a number of years. We have always shot for around 500 words assuming we would be comfortably over even the higher range of 400 that I have seen mentioned as also considered “thinâ€.
I/We had a decision to make. What would be some objections clients might have? What would be the cost to implement such a strategy? What should be done about the existing content? Can I prove this switch would pan out as advertised? Would the increase in rankings for fewer blogs be worth it? And what type of increase in traffic could we actually get? If one blog at 500 words gets 10-20 new organic visits over time and we write 4 blogs monthly, then we are looking at 40-80 incremental visits per month. The longer blog would need to get much more than 40-80 organic visits per month over time to justify the switch. Or what are we doing all this for? These and other questions had been swirling around my head in early 2018, what to do about and how would it impact our clients organic search rankings. So I decided to dig in.
There were two main reasons we hadn’t made the decision to change our content strategy until 2019.
The first being most of our clients are under contract and what it says is that we would publish a set number of blogs of a specific word count per month.
We hadn’t seen our strategy not work, most of the time, for most of our clients. Our strategy of hitting a steady amount of singles did indeed produce organic traffic growth. It increased the rankings of keywords and the amount of total keywords a given client would rank for.
The first is a bit of a conundrum as going back client by client to convince them that need to switch isn’t easy, it is costly in resources. Before we tackle communicating with clients, you have to first decide what will we communicate? The best thing to do is switch to the same amount of blogs but with more content. That strategy would mean we need to be able to charge more, but then we have to redo the contract. We ultimately decided that reducing the number of blogs and increasing the word count was the best idea as attempting to change the contract for 100’s of clients was too much to tackle. We believe we can have an impact with the strategy while keeping the remainder of our agreement the same. At the same time we changed all future agreements to longer form content.
The second lead me to do some live real word tests. I simply reached out to a few clients who I had great relationships with, told them about what I read, and got them onboard to be my test subjects. We honed in on a specific service they offered that they had value in, I found a couple keywords within that category of service and had a blog written. Just one, I didn’t want my clients to feel as though if they agreed and it didn’t work they would be stuck. I had a high level of confidence that it would but wasn’t expecting my small test to turn out as well as it did. In many cases, the new blogs we wrote of 1500+ words became the best performing pages for the clients organically in search results--some in just a few months! Here are three examples that stuck out as having such outsized results we had to do figure out how to do the switch.
Plastic Surgeon, location: metro area, population: less than 2 million
We wrote and posted a blog in May 2018--that page became the 2nd best performing page organically on the site in 6 months.. It has been the entry page to the site 5,400 times since then and now gets 800 visits per month.
Vein Clinic, location: rust belt metro area, population: 2.16 million
We wrote and posted a blog in April 2018--that page is now the best performing page organically on the site in 4 months. It has been the entry page to the site almost 20,000 times since then. In one 30 day period, it received 1,621 visits.
Hormone & Wellness, location: south Florida metro area, population: 900,000
We wrote and posted a blog in October 2018--that page is now the best performing page organically on the site. As of March 2019, it has received 411 visits and accelerating as in the last 30 days it received 301 visits of those visits. In 5 short months, it has gone from posted to 301 visits per month.
These are three of many examples. Not all examples are this extreme, but we firmly believe our new strategy will far outperform the existing one.
These examples and my discussion thus far, don’t hit on some of the other aspects the data shows about long form content ie 1500+ word count, which is shared more, increases onsite engagement, and gets ranked higher organically. Here are a 3rd party articles I read, to further cement why you should choose to do this.
From Word Tracker
“When researching which blog posts performed best on their site, Medium found that people spend the most time on blog posts that take seven minutes to read, with these posts also getting the most visitors on average. A seven-minute reading time translates to about 1,600 words.â€
How much does post length really count in SEO
From Search Engine Journal
"Average content length for Page 1 results is around 1,900 words, according to a 2016 study."
What’s the Ideal Blog Post Length for SEO?.
From Ad Push Up
“5. If a post is greater than 1,500 words, on average, it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likesâ€
10 highly actionable blogging statistics and facts
From Coschedule
“There’s a ton of advice out there that says everything from 275 to 2,500 words.
That’s … not a very helpful range. So, we did some research to definitively determine the answer.
The following studies will show you what length of content gives you the best chance of ranking on Google.â€
How Long Should a Blog Post Be to Get the Most Traffic and Shares?
From Backlinko
"4. Based on SERP data from SEMRush, we found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words."
We Analyzed 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO
If you’re not currently posting blogs with 1500+ words, it would be wise to reevaluate your strategy. As we read, publishing even one of these longer content blogs monthly can help exponentially increase website visits.
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