March 16, 2023
5 minutes
When starting your business and creating a website, it’s so important not to underestimate the power of content in the user buyer journey. In fact, content holds not only the power to build your website’s authority, set a tone of voice and raise awareness, but it also has the finesse to influence the decision stage, too.
In this instance, however, I’m going to be discussing the benefits of long-form content and how it can be used to reach users at the beginning of their buyer journey.
In general, long form content tends to be more in-depth, informative pieces of content coming in at over 700 words. This could be blogs, articles, how-to-guides, case studies, pillar pages and more. Unlike short-form content, long-form content provides more of an in-depth exploration into different topics, making it more beneficial to the user.
It’s important when creating long form content, that you keep it as digestible as possible and easy to read, as more often than not, long, blocky pieces of text can put the reader off fast, and in turn, cause your site to have a higher bounce rate. The overall object of long form-content, after all, is to inform, solve the user’s problem and increase your website’s authority, so you have to make sure that the content you produce is going to actually provide something of use to reach users at the beginning of their buyer journey.
There are so many benefits of using long-form content to help your user buyer journey, from boosting your rankings on Google to building relationships and authority – and these are only a few. We have included some of the biggest benefits of long form content down below.
There are so many ways in which long-form content can boost your google rankings and help you to reach users at the beginning of their buyer journey. For example, longer-form pieces of content often take the user longer to read, therefore increasing the page’s dwell time which is thought to be a ranking factor. In addition to this, long form content also provides more space for relevant keywords and internal link opportunities.
In-depth content also increases the page’s indexibility, as Google finds it easier to crawl, understand what the page is about, and ultimately, rank. In fact, a study conducted by serpIQ found that pages that ranked in position one and two of the SERPs tended to have more long-form content than those in positions three to ten:
Long form content is the perfect way to begin building trusting relationships with the user. More in-depth, knowledgeable pieces of content that thoroughly answers the user’s question or the intent of their query is not only more likely to rank higher (or even become a snippet),it’s also going to make your website a trusted source to go back to. Building trust and relationships with the user in the beginning of their buyer journey makes it a lot more likely that they will convert at the end, recommend you to a friend, or use your service again.
Long-form content is a lot more likely to be shared across social media sites. This is because in delivering useful content and building relationships with your users, it gives them much more reason to share what you have to say with the world. This is an essential part of reaching users at the beginning of their user buyer journey as it builds awareness and authority around your website.
Another great benefit of long-form content is that it can help you acquire backlinks from other websites who are looking to reference you on a similar topic. Backlinks are so important for SEO as they are proof that your content is useful, trustworthy and worth a read. Not only can backlinks from high authority websites boost the authority of your own, it can also help you rank higher in the SERPs for relevant keywords. Be careful, however, not all backlinks are good. Backlinks from sites with low authority can actually lower the trustworthiness of your site.
When creating long-form content there are a few key things you need to keep in mind. First up, is that although long-form content can boost your rankings in the SERPs, Google is always going to favour quality over quantity, so it’s important to bear in mind that whatever content your writing is going to actually be beneficial to the user. This means not including unnecessary paragraphs and fluffy words when they’re not relevant just to boost up your word count, as the user wants to get what they need from your content as efficiently as possible.
Another important thing to remember is to always put the user first when you’re writing your content, this means always using quality imagery to compliment your content when it’s relevant and not just for the sake of it, and definitely, NO keyword stuffing.
We have plenty more SEO and content writing tips to offer. For more information, get in touch with a member of our team or learn more about our SEO and Digital PR services through our blog and case studies.
