Creating content is one of the crucial strategies in marketing for the majority of companies. However, not everyone is doing it right. Just because it might seem easy to write several sentences on a certain topic doesn’t mean you will achieve good results. Moreover, most of the times, writing quality content is simply not enough. You will have to keep in mind several things if you wish your content brings you success.
With long-form articles, it can be challenging to keep your readers interested while, at the same time, focusing on SEO and providing useful information. After all, if your audience starts thinking your articles are not beneficial for them, they will stop reading it. That’s why each piece of content should include valuable information for your target audience, especially long-reads.
Long-reads over generic posts
When talking about the length, long-reads are considered to be articles with several thousands of words. As many businesses assume that creating a lot of content means creating a lot of generic posts, they miss the opportunity to create really valuable content for their readers. Long-reads are way more effective and popular with every target audience due to several factors. First, you have plenty of space to add research, statistics, different approaches, professional opinions, etc. Second, Google and other search engines prefer long-form articles over short ones as people tend to stay longer on such sites. Third, people prefer to read one article that has valuable information than to read a few of them. Lastly, such articles are more trustworthy than generic ones.
However, there are some risks you have to be aware if you decide to write long-form posts:
· It’s challenging to retain the attention of your audience throughout articles with thousands of words.
· Long-reads need to have a more complicated structure than generic posts.
· You will need to find additional multimedia to break your content into sections.
If you’re not sure what your long-reads should look like, you can always seek assistance from a guest post agency. These agencies know what type of content is the best choice for your business. For instance, your existing articles can be repurposed for something else, like a guide or a video explainer. In fact, long reads are probably one of the most fruitful type of content to repurpose as there are so many accents to focus on. For example, you may find a powerful phrase in the article, copy and paste the quote and post it as a picture on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Or, maybe a certain type of content is currently popular in your industry and you should focus on creating it. Luckily, you will easily find successful examples you can implement in your content marketing strategy. Hiring a guest posting service is an efficient way to achieve this fully and professionally.
Optimizing long-reads
As we’ve already mentioned, articles with thousands of words will improve your SEO results. But, it’s not enough just to write 2,000 or 3,000 words and expect to see an amazing increase in your traffic numbers. So, what should you do to ensure your website attracts more visitors and converts them into customers? Before you start writing down ideas for your new articles, you should take a look at your existing ones and see which ones can be updated. Nothing will improve your SEO results better than an update of your old content. To optimize your existing articles, you should:
· Replace old information with the new one (research or studies).
· Add new suggestions or approaches.
· Insert recent multimedia such as infographics, images or video.
· Keep the old URL so the search engines don’t treat it like new content.
· Check what is outdated and remove it completely.
The difference between long-reads and generic posts is in the focus. With generic posts, you’re focused on creating attention-grabbing sentences, headings, and subheadings. With long-reads, the focus is on the structure of the article. When writing long-reads, you should also think about your keywords. If you’re writing niche articles, create long tail keywords to ensure better ranking on search engines. According to Marketing Pilgrim, search queries with eight words are up by 34,000%. As you get used to writing long-reads, start creating more content as it will significantly boost your traffic.
Conclusion
Nowadays, content marketers are focusing more on articles that have several thousands of words. Knowing how much benefits such long-reads have for their business, it’s not a surprise that the majority of companies are moving away from generic posts and investing in quality content. After all, the behaviour of today’s customers is dynamically changing as people want to know more information about companies. What is a better way to convey this information than with quality, long-form articles?
To read more on topics like this, check out the finances category.