Short Form VS Long Form Content: Which One Is Best For SEO

We are all aware of the importance of developing content that can engage your readers with you. You may hear people's advice on the length of content. For any business best way to grow is to start a blog.

It's the best way to inform your audience and potential clients about your business, new products, events, and so on.

Short-Form Content VS Long-Form Content

But there is a lot of misconception in the content marketing industry.

You may get a piece of advice that long-form content runs well or get a better ranking than short-form content, or every piece of content on your site should have at least 1000-2000 words minimum.

This advice is wrong or right in the right sense.

This means long-form content or short-form content have their place in successful content marketing.

For Ex. Is writing a 2000 words article on "How to tie a tie?" Make sense? Absolutely No!

People who are searching for this only want to know how to do that not about their history. You only need to put some videos or images step-by-step approach to make it done.

Sometimes, long-form content is waste of time other times it's necessary to stand the best chance of ranking.

In this guide, you’ll learn a simple way to figure out how much to write on a topic-by-topic basis.

What Is Short-Form Content?

Short-Form Content is typically anything under 1000 words. You may consider short-form content like 700-800 words, it may vary for different people and that's fine.

It's quick and easy to digest content that covers a specific area of a topic rather than going into in-depth details.

Common formats of short-form content include:

Short blog posts
Social content
Emails
Infographics
News articles

What Is Long-Form Content?

Long-Form Content is typically anything around 1200 words or more. Again, this word counts is what we consider, for you, it may be 2000 words.

Long-Form Content Types:

Detailed and lengthy blog posts
Evergreen pages
Guides and tutorials
Whitepapers and eBooks
Webinars and virtual events
Pillar pages

These content formats actually engage the audience due to the depth of the topic that it covers. It is not easy to quick-to-consume content.

But do not forget that long-form content consumes a lot of resources and is not easy to create. However, the return and results of long-form content can be huge if it's used strategically.

Does the Length of Your Content Matter?

That question is commonly asked by Content Marketers, SEOs, and Bloggers which confuses everyone around there in between long-form vs short-form content.

The simple answer to this question is "Yes", the length of your content matters. It matters on the topic and type of content you are creating. Like I said above, if you make 2000 words article on "How to tie a tie" then no buddy will look at the article. In this term length of your content matters.

The length of your content needs to be right to serve the right purpose of your creating content. That's why it's so important to understand how to choose the right format of content for a different purpose.

Like, many ranking factors studies have shown the correlation between length of content and higher search ranking.

In many cases, longer content performs better for organic searches than shorter content. But that is not just because of word count.

It's because many search queries require detailed content and results to cover a topic in great depth.

Now, let's take a look at the eCommerce category page's ranks with a 200-250 words product description on it.

But that doesn't stop the page to rank first(1st) in search results.

You should focus on creating content that will solve the search query whether it's long or short content.

So, don't focus on creating longer content instead try to use the right length and format to meet your goals (matches the search intent of search engine users.)

Now, we will see five steps in which you can write content:

Look at what’s ranking
Pick a content format
What Is Your User Intent? Use Keywords to Mimic Their Intent
What Are Your Business Goals for the Content?
Start writing
Trim Unnecessary Words

1) Look at What's Ranking

Search your target keyword in google and see what's ranking. You can do this by using the Ahrefs toolbar to view the results of your target keywords.

Ahref Toolbar Result Page

2) Pick a Content Format

Your content will never rank unless you align it with what users are searching for, regardless of how much you write. Usually, it's best to choose the content format which is already ranking.

Here are a few popular content formats to look out for:

Guides
Tutorials
Definitions
Listicles
“Vs.” posts
How-tos
Reviews

For Ex. if we look at search results for "Best Writing Assistant Software" they are all of Listicle Content. So, there you do not need to write a guide or tutorials on the writing assistant tool.

Best Writing Assistant Tool

There we see the mixed content types with "definitions" or "guides", this is known as mixed intent keywords.

With mixed intent keywords, it's up to you which content format you decide to write. But, keep in mind some formats will help your business a better opportunity to promote than others.

3) What Is Your User Intent? Use Keywords to Mimic Their Intent

Once you figure out the right content format you should create a set of keywords to integrate with the final content. These keywords should match the search intent of users because these keywords signal the search engine as your content is relevant and rank higher in search results.

Along with keywords, you should use sub-headers. This type of formatting is helpful and incites users to continue reading.

Or using sub-headers shows how you distribute your full content on headlines, which makes readers know the full scene before getting started reading it.

4) What Are Your Business Goals for the Content?

Finally, think about your goals, what you want and how you will meet your goals.

Smart marketers first decide their goals and then the way of approach which best fit their business goals.

Since you will be spending time and resources, you should know what are your goals for the content you are creating and which way you will implement it.

For Ex, if your goal is to increase awareness about your new product launch, you might decide to use the most effective but point-to-point emails to your subscribers.

Email Marketing has a 42% ROI(Return On Investment). If you are not collecting emails of your users then start doing it now.

In this instance, short-form content is the most effective choice.

On the other hand, if your goal is to rank in Google for a competitive search term and drive traffic to your site, there is very likely you will turn to long-form content.

5) Start Writing

It's finally the time when you will put your goal and format into creation.

This is where you will show your creativity and share your knowledge with the world. Just to make sure you don't go too far away from the main topic which needs to cover so your readers will get satisfied. By the way, you are there to provide real value to your searchers.

Try not to worry about word count instead focus on getting your thoughts down.

Here are some useful tips to write well for your content:

A) Freewrite

In this writing strategy, you need to start writing without looking for grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, or backspace. Just write without stopping till your set time or when you finish your writing.

You will probably find this your content flow will get better if you master this writing technique.

B) Use Pomodoro Technique

In this technique, you will write no stop for 25 minutes before taking 5 minutes break.

You must repeat this process as many times as possible to get your content done.

C) Use Grammarly Writing Assistant Tool

Grammarly is the best writing assistant tool, I ever used. There are many similar tools like Grammarly but they are with few features or distract users by displaying word count on the screen.

Grammarly Writing Assistant Tool

I recommend you to not use these tools or if you are using them try to avoid looking at the word count. Many times it slips you into thinking. "Hey, this is getting long " or "Hey, this is too short".

This kind of thinking you must avoid during the writing and try to focus on completing your content.

6) Trim Unnecessary Words

Deleting unnecessary words from your final draft is important for publishing your content live. Whether your content ends up short-form or long-form it takes many words or sentences which don't make sense.

Long paragraphs, points that nobody cares about, and sometimes need to rearrange sentences or points.

It seems too bad but the first draft is exactly what it looks like. You will find it much easier to trim and refine your ideas than during writing them.

Removing unnecessary words, rewriting meandering sentences, and making sure things are as concise as possible. Tools like Grammarly and Hamington can help you with this.

I use Grammarly which helps me to write my content by rewriting sentences, suggesting errors, clarity, and engagement.

It has a readability score, with reading time, speaking time, words count, and character count. There I use a readability score and nothing else to not be distracted from writing.

Here few other factors that may influence your decision.

Do Not Repeat Yourself

Let's say you are researching any sub-topic for your content and find that you already covered it on your site.

For example, our SEO beginners guide: get free traffic from google primarily targeting "seo", and similar keywords.

We know people are interested not only in SEO but in their types, how it works, strategies and tools.

But here's the thing: I've already created dedicated guides and listicles posts on tools.

For that reason: I decide not to mix up everything, instead, I choose to make a brief explanation of them and link to the guides in each sub-topics in case the reader wants to learn more.

Excerpt/ Section of blog post showing list of links

And in each sub-post about individual guides, I link back to our SEO Beginners Guide.

Linking and linking back is known as a topic cluster or content hub, and it has a few reasons why it is seo beneficial.

You can write multiple posts targeting multiple intents

Yeah, you can write multiple posts targeting multiple intents for the same topic.

Let's take a Keyword "on page seo."

If you look at SERP, it has mixed definitive posts and guides.

SERP Overview of on-page seo

The definition posts are short-form content while guides are long-form content.

Although you can pick any one format for creating content here, you might want to create multiple posts in a different format for the same topic to win multiple rankings.

In that case, that means creating a definition short-form post and long-form guide.

Conclusion

You must focus on satisfying your readers not hitting word counts.

In this full post, you must understand using word count will not help you but your goals, content creation intent, and your format.

We discuss both forms of content, and it concludes the best length of content is based on the needs of your readers, the best length of content is based on the needs of your customers, goals of content creation.

Focus your efforts on content creation that is the right length to serve the purpose that you need and want to serve — this is the best place to start.

Short Form VS Long Form Content: Which One Is Best For SEO

What Is Short-Form Content?

What Is Long-Form Content?