Two Important Things (Other Than Length) To Make Your Long Form Content Rank

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Long form content has gradually taken over the blogosphere, thanks largely to Google’s emphasis on publishing high-quality content.

This subtle endorsement by the almighty Google has brought a stampede of unserious publishers who are always determined to outsmart one another in the quest to occupy the top spot on search engine result pages (SERPs).

This has resulted in most blog posts nowadays being between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

However, when dealing with long form content, one thing is very, very important:

  • It’s not about length, it’s about quality.

So, when writing long form content, emphasis needs to be placed on producing evergreen posts. But why should we be concerned about evergreen content?

According to Al Gomez, “on the subject of content marketing, for instance, I often find myself reading and enjoying the more comprehensive older posts more than I do the new, rehashed ones from syndicate sites. It’s not that I don’t find the new ideas awesome – it’s usually because older (or evergreen posts) tend to have a better grasp of the topics I care to know about.”

You can now understand why Google is interested in seeing you write long form and evergreen content.

So now that we know length is not the only thing which ranks a page, what else do we need to pay attention to?

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Two Important Things To Focus On When Looking To Rank Long Form Content

1. Page Load Speed

Page load speed is an important metric for ranking websites, and it is important that you pay attention to it.

Unfortunately, lots of websites owners neglect this.

They believe that with quality content on their site, readers will keep coming. But this is not entirely true.

Google is very mindful of the loading speed of your site because it represents a part of the overall user experience – a slow loading blog does not leave a great user experience. Faster sites, in general, make users happier, and as a result, they will get a higher rank.

In one blog post on the Google Webmaster’s blog, the Google team stated that:

“Here at Google, we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.”

Similarly, in a blog post on the SEMrush blog, “Users are less likely to stay on a website that takes ages to load and Google will certainly penalize your website for being too slow. Also, a fast website also converts better.

With tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom, you can check your website’s loading speed.

If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, you should do something about it.

Here is ShoutMeLoud on Pingdom:

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For more info:

2. Rich Media

Adding in visually appealing graphics will increase your subscribers, leads, traffic, and also, your rank.

Jeff Bullas stated that,articles with images get 94% more views than articles without images.” Now, if I confidently tell you that doing something as simple as adding relevant images into your post would boost your page views by ninety-four percent, you probably wouldn’t think twice about adding in an image or two.

Essentially, a blog post’s media directly affects backlinks, traffic, and shares, especially on social media.

For example, tweets with photos average 35% more retweets:

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Similarly, posts with good images get shared more on Facebook, as 87% of popular posts on the platform include images:

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Recently, several bloggers and content creators started adding videos to their content because of the increased user experience. It’s little wonder why informative videos are ranking so high in search engine result pages.

But images aren’t just vital for blog traffic alone, they’re equally important for memory. This Brainrules study shows that“images make information much easier to remember”.  They call this the “Pictorial Superiority Effect”.

Information and images
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Interestingly, many of your subscribers feel they don’t have the time to read your content all the way to the end. But if you add in a high quality and informative video as part of the content, I bet they’ll happily watch until the end.

This is because some people may find long blocks of text boring. For these users, videos become the best way to engage them.

This all has a direct effect on the ranking of your site. If Google sees that your site is providing a great user-experience, they won’t hesitate to rank you higher.

For instance, the featured image is one of the first things a user sees before reading the content. If this image isn’t engaging, there’s a high chance that people will just ignore the content altogether and the rank will ultimately drop.

Therefore, if you really want your site to have lots of happy fans, and also rank high in the search engines, you should never ignore the use of quality media in your posts.

For more info:

Ranking Long Form Content

Long form content is undoubtedly valuable.

But length is not the only criteria that Google uses in ranking your site; other factors like page load speed and rich media must be given their due considerations.

Far too often, marketers make the mistake of writing long form content and expecting great search rankings, but this is not going to happen.

You need to optimize your site so that your users are happy and your website is professional.

If you make sure to take proper care of your site, then ranking high in SERPs won’t be a problem.

What are some of the things you focus on when trying to rank long form content? Do you pay attention to these two factors? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

26 thoughts on “Two Important Things (Other Than Length) To Make Your Long Form Content Rank”

  1. Aryan Raj

    Hi Harsh,

    Informative guide but I wonder if long articles have to be used some giphy and video including some basic CSS customization to make it more interesting.

    Blog speed definitely help in ranking but schema rich enabled themes play an important role for a long term blog 🙂

  2. Rupesh Kumar

    In fact, speed is the most vital factor when it comes to user experience. A user may wait for more than 4 seconds for your article to load if you are famous but otherwise, he may bounce. Personally, I have experienced challenging task to lower down page load speed below 3 seconds when my website is on shared hosting plan.
    Hosting plan influence big time on page load speed. CDN, Image optimization, fewer widgets, etc. will complement a good hosting plan.
    In the near future, I will for sure move to cloud based or dedicated server hosting plan to bring down the page speed.

  3. Joshua

    Hello Harsh,

    Great job. Ir reminded me of something. Work smarter, not harder.

  4. Vinod Singh

    Yes, All the things you mentioned -long content, Page Load Speed and Rich media are crucial factors for ranking in search engine. In long content we can easily insert all desirable keywords without affecting post quality.

  5. Susan Velez

    Hi Harsh,

    Great tips and I remember when we could get away with just writing 500-word blog posts. While I don’t really pay attention to my content word count.

    My main focus is to provide quality content and get everything in that I need to say. Once the post is written, I’ll go back a few days later and edit the post.

    I also use a lot of images as I prefer reading blog posts that have images. If the blogger doesn’t use images, I find it very difficult to say interested in the post.

    Thanks for sharing these tips have a great day 🙂

    Susan

  6. Manish Kumar

    Great tips sir. I too post long content on my blog, but didnt know why those posts didnt rank well.
    Now i will try these tips and lets hope for the best.
    Thanks for sharing this.

  7. Cory @ Growing Dollars from Cents.com

    Love the post Harsh.

    Definitely long form content is King now. I remember reading blog posts that were only 500 words that left me wondering where is the rest.

    I finished reading the post and it still didn’t solve my problems.

    Long worded posts can have more detailed information about solving problems.

    This is what I’m trying to do with my blog posts. Quality with quantity.

  8. Dan Grijzenhout

    Page load speed in 2017 is very important to Google. In their published documentation, they are now penalizing all pages that take more than 2-4 seconds to load – particularly on mobile platforms. So when you are checking your page load speeds, be sure to check their speeds on your mobile devices and tablets as well. Best wishes, – Dan Grijzenhout

  9. Andrea Torti

    Absolutely – visual content and rich media in general can really boost the visibility of your pieces and websites: that’s why so many content creators are investing time and resources on infographics, charts and videos

  10. Vishal Garg

    Hi Harsh,
    Very helpful post for me, now I prefer long form content with perfect media on the website to get better rank on SERP’s. Thank you, for sharing.

  11. Prosper Noah

    Hi Harsh,

    Definitely long form contents should be taken very seriously and as you said, its helps Google rank your site better and as well understand very well what your content is about.

    Page Load Speed is a must have too, I personally would not waste much time reading a long content whose page takes years to load.

    Adding visuals (Rich Media) as said in the post also helps for User Experience and helps not Make the content boring as it tends to be a long content.

    These two are great tips and I definitely believe anyone can rank his long contents following your guide however we should all focus on not just the length but the quality it entails.

    Do have a nice day Harsh!

  12. Tusar

    Hi harsh,
    My website’s speed according to pingdom is 1.2 sec and according to gtmetrix it’s 85% is it enough.
    Please let me know.

  13. Ashutosh singh

    Hi Harsh,
    Great article as always. Actually I also realised that the article which wasn’t load fastly I quit that. And load time matters for readers.
    Please tell me what I can do if my website load time is greater than 3 second.
    Thank you.

  14. Karan Gupta

    Hi Harsh,

    You are really helping a lot to new bloggers like me. Yes its true, a lot of inforgraphics and pictures helps a lot in attracting traffic and I recently get to know when I wrote a blog with lots of images.Traffic increases tremendously with iimages and infographics..

  15. Palashtd

    Hi Harsh,
    Thanks for your writing. But I would like to know what is the minimum featured image size (width and height) that will perfect for SEO.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Palashtd
      Wow! That’s an interesting question. There is no minimum requirement as such.However, I should suggest use it according to your content area size. Initially, I used to use 400*500 image size & now I prefer using 1000*1000 image size as I have more users from USA & screen sizes & quality is improving. This is more of usability than SEO.

  16. Jhasketan Garud

    Hi Harsh,

    I totally agree with you.
    I would like to add some to this though.
    One has to be very careful with using the rich media as well. Too much of rich media above the fold might hamper the page load speed (it however depends on your image type).
    I think one rich media above the fold will do the job. You can certainly add the others below the fold, as the same will not adversely affect the page load time.

  17. T I Antor

    Getting advised by one of my friends’ who is a successful blogger, I have written some long form contents. But, I did not pay attention to these two important things. Now, I will do. But, I have another thing to get advised by you. As you mentioned the importance of fast page loading and rich media like videos. My confusion is here. I have added videos to some of my posts and noticed that those pages take a long time to load while the pages without videos are more than 30% fast. I have checked them on Gtmetrix. As for example, the speed score of a page with a video is 52% while the score of a page without any video is 87%. As a result, I have deleted all videos from those pages but I am still confused about using videos. Hope you will explain this and leave me some advice.

  18. Ryan Biddulph

    I like the emphasis on writing quality posts Harsh. I sometimes read long posts where the blogger was more focused on reaching a set word count versus writing a quality, valuable, free flowing post. As if publishing 2600 words would land the post on page 1 of Google. Nope. I focus on writing quality, engaging, colorful posts, and have been speeding things up load-time-wise along with dropping eye-catching, branded images into my posts. Smart tips all around here.

  19. Yogesh Khetani

    Hello Harsh,

    Adding visually appealing graphics will increase your subscribers, leads, traffic, and also, your rank but that will eventually lead to increase in the page size. I believe Image optimization and other techniques should be applied here. Apparently, as a blogger, you will now have to deal with a lot many things apart from great content.

  20. Vishwajeet Kumar

    Hello Harsh,

    Thanks for this detailed and informative post. Google loves long content but quality also matters here. You have to use visuals to make your content more engaging and helpful to users. Page loading speed is definitely plays a great role in ranking and I always pay a close attention to my blog’s loading speed. Thanks again for bringing up this helpful post.

    Have a great Day 🙂
    Vishwajeet

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