Every
website on the Internet uses content to get new customers.
But what different kinds of content work best? And more importantly, how long does content need to be in order to work?
Informational articles
Informative
articles are pieces of content that probably take up the bulk of your website.
They
are the pages that give users information about your products, services,
strategies, or your company as a whole, although there really are no
limitations in terms of topics.
Informational
articles, sometimes also referred to as article pages, are usually around 1,500
to 2,000 words – and for good reason.
Content
pages with this high of a word count are also called longform articles, and
they have been proven to rank higher in search engine results pages.
(SearchEngineLand ) SerpIQ conducted a study that looked in depth at the search results for more
than 20,000 keywords. The average length of the top 10 results in SERPs, or
search engine results pages, was around 2,000. In fact, the average number one
ranked page had 2,416 words.
That
being said, if you want your article pages to rank highly, you should aim to
have more than 2,000 words – even though it might be a little lengthier than
what you’re used to writing.
Blog posts
Blog
posts are great pieces of content to add to your website because they let you
make quick and timely updates to your site. Blog posts are also easily
shareable on your social media accounts, and in email newsletters.
You
can use blogs to give your opinion on something, or to spur conversation with
your potential and current customers.
Just
like informational articles, it has been proven that the longer your blog
posts, the better. You should aim for more than 1,000 words to ensure that you
rank highly in search engines.
Typically,
blogs aren’t made to be as lengthy as a longform because a blog reader is
looking to gain insight or read an opinion fairly quickly. They usually aren’t
looking for an expansive discussion, rather an easy-read. Though some blogs can
definitely be longer than 1,000 words!
10x content
10x
content is designed to be 10 times better than other content written on a
topic.
The
topics that you cover with 10x content should be topics that you can speak at
length about, and should entirely inform readers on a subject.
Instead
of just using text, you should also include images, videos, mini-graphics, and
other multimedia to keep the page from feeling like a long wall of text.
That
being said, this is the longest kind of content. 10x articles are at least
2,500 words so you can cover all the details of the subject and adequately
explain your visual elements.
Case studies
Case
studies are great ways to draw users to your website because they are real-life
accounts of how your services affect your customers.
It’s
hard to determine exactly how long case studies should be, but your case
studies should always tell the whole story behind the topic.
If
you only give bits and pieces of a customer experience, and leave out the details
of how they got the results they did with your product or service, your study
won’t be much help to readers.
But when you show someone the full scope of your work, your readers will see the level of your work and commitment to customers.
Videos
Videos
are another kind of content that can help draw users to your website, and keep
them there.
Topics
for videos can range from a tour of your facility, to a how-to video using one
of your products.
No
matter what the content, you should keep your video fairly short for easy
viewing.
In a
study done by Wistia, it was proven that the shorter the video, the more likely
users are to watch the entire video.
Not
only are shorter videos watched more often, but it’s more likely that users
will watch them from start to finish.
Videos
that range from 10-20 minutes in length will only be watched 50% of the time,
whereas videos that are one minute or shorter will be watched 75% of the time.
Since
search engine ranking is so important, you should do everything you can to
ensure that your content makes it onto the first page – and with these content
length guidelines, you’re ready to go!
Do you have any other content types that rank highly in Google? Let us know in the comments below!
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