We are seeing that the form of content over social media is getting shorter and shorter every day. There are 280 words tweets, 15 seconds reels, YouTube shorts, and much more. But there, on the other hand, we are also hearing that the bigger the article, the better its chances to perform! What is it? And what truth does it hold at all? Blurn says that there is some truth to it in 2021, but people need to know a few things before it! Click here about Blurn, to check it out about Blurn and its expertise in the field of SEO and everything related to websites.
So what about long-form content and its impact on the SERP results?
Does longer word count mean better SEO and SERP ranking?
The very first thing to keep in mind is that Google has never said that the length of the content goes proportional to the SERP ranking. Furthermore, it has been emphasized many a time that the length of the content does not guarantee you rankings. So why is everybody chanting about the length of the content being proportional to the rankings?
All this theory comes from research done by some SEO guys who found out that longer-form articles were getting higher at SERP. But then where does quality come? And also, should you really write longer articles about everything?
Content is king and Quality its wing!
Google has laid this thing thousands of times, if not millions, that it purely focuses on user intent and its experience. There is this simple logic — why would one want to read a 4000-word article when one just wants to know how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew? This leads us to a simple deduction that the length of the content does vary according to the kind of content. You would never! The mind simply exits the website on seeing huge form content and you get left to click here (about Blurn) and there to seek a straight answer.
For this, you first must ask yourself if you would be willing to read the length of content you are writing for the title you have given. But, is there any genuine length that one should target?
What content length is optimal for SERP?
As we have already talked about earlier, the length of the content does depend on what the article or blog is about. You would not want to write a 500-word article on a topic that requires clarity, and you would also not want to write a movie script about a topic that needs a brief answer. Imagine if you click here about Blurn, to check it out about Blurn, about its services and prices, and see a 4000 word article written about itself. You would get mad about its narcissism and exit.
The study that got done revealed something strange, that however there was not a fixed length that was getting higher SERP rankings, there was a range that was getting some clicks. Even then, there was another dynamic to it – the type of subject.
Articles having a range of 500-2500 words were getting the maximum clicks. This speaks for itself, that the length of the content was varying much. Furthermore, the content is neither too short and nor is too long. But this is not all.
Apart from it, it came to the type of blogs. The wellbeing and entertainment blogs with higher word count were getting results, whereas the articles about food and sports with shorter length were performing. Simply put, when you want to see a recipe, you just want to see the recipe and not the story about where it came from and why tomato is called tomato. So where do we draw the line?
The major Google updates that shadows the length factor!
Earlier there was BERT being BERT, now it is MUM stepping with a sneer upon her face. No! These are not just some words; these are the major Google updates. BERT has already changed the way Google works, and now MUM, which Google has revealed that is 1000 (yes! one thousand) times stronger than BERT will start impacting from early 2022. But what are these?
BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, was a technology that aimed to understand the language and process it naturally. It had aimed at understanding the actual user intent behind the query so it could serve the right result to the user! If a user is searching about “show me some cool hats”, it would make sense that the user does not want to see hats with cooler temperatures, probably less than 5 degrees Celsius. It would know that cool actually means trendy and attractive! This is just one example. If you have a sentence that says ‘Click here about Blurn’, then it will understand that it says to click here to know more about Blurn and will serve you the article when you would want to check it out about Blurn.
And now we have this MUM, Multitask Unified Model, which will try going through thousands of articles across 75 languages, weave a perfect answer, and represent it to the user using different elements. This simply means that writing bad-quality content will simply turn against you.
The thing is simple, length does not matter much as long as the content is serving its purpose right. The main focus that is around is to provide a better user experience. For this you can do few things:
- Write beautifully structured high-quality content.
- Design your website in a way that provides a smooth and wonderful user experience. For example, it should load fast and the website should be responsive.
So how does longer-form content work, if any way it does?
How does long form content help? (if anyway it does!)
The possible reason is when the long-form content comes to be of good quality. What good quality and well-structured content do is that it keeps the user on the page for long enough. This leads to a higher retention rate, lower bounce rate, good DA and PA, and then more backlinks. But it does not come true for every form of content. When the subject is requiring a shorter answer, the shorter form content is getting more clicks. So the thing is simply about writing what should be written. MUM update is going to change the surfing game further on and it would be able to understand the meaning behind the article, the sentences in there, and the paras.
Blurn strictly warns about writing longer content unnecessarily. It fires back when done in a wrong way and around the wrong subject. Click here about Blurn, to check it out about Blurn, and how it offers its expertise around SEO, link-building, and Web design and development to businesses around the world for years long.
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