Imagine you are planning a backpacking trip to the mountains, and you have two articles for it. One is a quick list of essentials for mountain climbing. The other is a detailed guide with survival tips, gear, food hacks, emergency plans, and many more. Which one will you choose? Definitely, the latter one, as it is not just offering the essentials but also practical advice and strategies to handle everything. The same thinking and concept align with your audience also. Short, brief content may be tempting, but detailed content helps people make informed decisions and handle situations better. As per the statistics, long-form content performs 10x times better and more effectively than short-form content.
Whether you are a full-time content writer or a freelancer, mastering long-form content requires in-depth information, strategies, and research. With long-form content, the audience may get bored due to their shorter attention span. Therefore, even while writing a 3000-word article, it’s crucial to maintain the audience’s interest and attention. This means your content should be written in an engaging way, including important subheadings, examples, statistics, and more.
In this blog, we will share an in-depth guide on how to write articles over 3,000 words and build a long-lasting connection with your audience. We will cover everything from choosing the right topic to publishing and promoting such content effectively.
What is Long-Form Content?
Long-form content is a piece of content that is over 1000 words. It can be a detailed article of 1500 words or a complete guide of 3000 words covering every point related to the topic. However, only word limit does not define the meaning of a long-form content. Long-form content also has depth and the ability to give the audience a complete understanding of the topic.
Long-form content provides immense value to the reader by covering the topic in detail. From background and definition to importance, benefits, uses, tips, etc., long-form content combines all details. It provides comprehensive answers to all potential questions a reader may have about the subject. Understand this with a simple example:
Suppose you are writing on a topic: The Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.
In a short form content of 1000 words, you can only cover the benefits. However, in long-form content of 1000+ words, you can cover various aspects like:
- The history and evolution of AI in healthcare
- Different types of AI technologies used in healthcare
- The benefits of AI in medical practices
- Challenges that healthcare experts may face in AI usage
- Case studies of successful AI integration in hospitals
- A step-by-step guide on how to begin incorporating AI into healthcare, etc.
Someone who is keen to add AI to their healthcare services will definitely go for the long form content rather than the brief one.
Why is Long-form Content Important?
Contrary to many perspectives, long-form content is still relevant and works excellently in the digital world. One study even found that content of 7000+ words drives 4 times more traffic than average short-form blogs. If not 7000 words, you can still get similar benefits by writing a long 3000 words blog with detailed information. Even after a reduced attention span, the essence of long-form content still remains prevalent. Have a look at why long-form content is important:
Higher Rankings
Search engine algorithms prefer long-form content over short content due to its detailed information and high value. According to one study, the top 10 results for every query are generally blogs that are over 2000 words. This is because search engines prefer long-form content that provides great value to visitors.
High Engagement
Detailed and high-value content contains interesting information right from scratch of the topic. It follows a timeline that addresses readers’ questions and hooks their interest, keeping them on the page for a longer time. This boosts user experience, reduces bounce rate, and ultimately increases engagement.
Builds Brand Reputation
In-depth articles, lengthy guides, and detailed blog posts show your expertise in the industry and topic. This gives you authority in your industry, which establishes audience trust in your brand, ultimately building brand reputation. The more long-form content you publish, the more expertise you can demonstrate.
More Backlinks Opportunities
Long-form content with in-depth information attracts more natural backlinks from high domain authority websites. Search engines consider backlinks from high-DA websites as a sign of high-quality, relevant, fresh, and engaging content. This boosts your SEO efforts, increases rankings, and enhances your online presence.
Builds Audience Trust
Long-form content is a one-stop solution to readers’ problems, becoming their ultimate savior. It offers complete information about the topic, answering all the questions that may arise in your audience’s mind. This builds their trust in your brand and transforms them into your loyal audience.
Greater Lead Generation
High-quality, long-form content attracts a larger audience, which means a high number of social shares. When your readers share your blog on their social media, it reaches a massive audience who may show interest in your content. The more the reach and traffic, the higher the lead generation.
How to Choose the Right Topic and Angle while writing Long-Form Content?
Now, as you know the meaning and importance of long-form content, it’s time to understand how exactly to write it. The first step in writing long-form content or any other content is finding the right topic and deciding the angle. The topic is what you are writing about, and the angle is how you write it. Both angle and topic play an important role in long-form content. Have a look at how you can choose the right topic and angle for writing engaging and relevant content.
Understand your Audience
Research their Needs: Understand your audience and identify their pain points, questions, interests, problems, and frequently asked questions. This helps you choose the topic that is most relevant to your audience and aligns with their interests. To do that, you can simply use social media, keyword research, market trends, surveys, and forums, which help you gather insights.
Create Reader Personas: Once you identify and understand your audience’s needs, develop a detailed profile of your majority of readers. Mention their goals, challenges, interests, and preferences to write content that aligns with their needs and answers their questions.
Select a Relevant Topic
Brainstorm Ideas: Use industry trends, FAQs, surveys, news, and your personal expertise to brainstorm ideas and find trending topics. You can even monitor search demand, social media discussions, and competitor content to brainstorm ideas and trending topics.
Check Evergreen topics: Evergreen topics are the ones that stay relevant to the audience regardless of time and trends. To find them, analyze your audience and focus on subjects and topics that generate maximum traffic, engagement, and interest over time.
Research Keywords: Use tools like Google Trends, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to find high-volume keywords relevant to your niche. Keywords can give you an idea of what topics are trending in the market. Understand the search demand of those keywords to choose the one with maximum reach potential. It’s best to look for long-tail keywords to make your content more discoverable.
Leverage Your Expertise: Simply write about the topics you are passionate and knowledgeable about. You must have unique insights, information, statistics, and experience that can help you curate compelling and authoritative content.
Decide the Angle
Identify Gaps: Once you find the relevant topic, look for content gaps or angles others have not yet covered. For example, suppose you choose a topic and find out that the existing content lacks case studies and practical examples for that topic. You can simply broaden your research, use your personal experience, and add real or hypothetical examples.
Try Different Formats: Writing a simple blog does not attract the audience anymore. You have to decide how your content can be more effective, interesting, and valuable for your audience. Whether as a how-to guide, a comprehensive guide, a case study, an opinion piece, or a comparison. The kind of format you choose ultimately decides the angle.
Interview Experts: It’s not possible for one person to possess all the information about a particular topic. Therefore, to decide and shape the angle, it’s best to talk to the industry experts and get a fresh perspective. This might help you add a personal element to your post and add a unique angle and perspective.
Deep Research Techniques for In-Depth Content
After choosing a trending, evergreen, or topic in which you have expertise, it’s time to research content for that topic. Long-form content goes beyond the main topic, covering every aspect of it, from history to future predictions. Such in-depth content requires a lot of research, which is possible only when you use the right deep research techniques. Have a look at a few of them to write detailed long-form content:
Start with a Comprehensive Outline
Break down your topic into various important key sections and their subheadings and create a detailed outline. A pre-built outline helps you research each topic individually and find the most valuable content for each head. Besides that, it also helps you identify the areas that require more research. After that, for each subhead, list the questions your audience might have about that topic and address each one in the content.
Use Credible Sources for Research
Long-form content contains in-depth information about a topic, which requires research not only from experts but also from the audience. Therefore, firstly conduct surveys and experiments via tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to gather original data. After that, use secondary sources like industry reports, e-books, academic journals, whitepapers, etc., for more content. You can use Google Scholar, JSTOR, and other peer-reviewed journals and research papers for extensive research. These sources contain the subject experts’ important and relevant information related to your topic.
Conduct Expert Interviews
Expert interviews are a great way to enrich your content with unique information, insights, and perspectives. The knowledge and information experts possess add more credibility and authority to your blog. To do that:
- Reach out to experts who specialize in your topic and conduct thorough interviews with them.
- Ask about their insights, opinions, and perspectives on the topic you are writing about.
- Prepare a list of questions in advance and make sure to ask them naturally during the interview process.
Leverage Advanced Search Operators
There are different advanced search operators that can help you find specific and relevant content on a particular topic.
Refine Searches: You can use “site:.gov” or “site:.edu” to focus on government and educational websites and intitle: and filetype:pdf for specific reputable sources.
Boolean Search: Use advanced search operators like AND, OR, and NOT to filter search results as per your requirements.
Double Quotes: If you require content on a specific topic or keyword, write it in quotes (“”) to find the exact matches and narrow down the results.
Utilize Social Media Discussions
Social media platforms, whether forums or social listening tools, contain your target audience actively discussing their viewpoints and perspectives. Therefore, use niche forums like Reddit and Quora to check common questions, trends, and debates and cover them in your blog. Secondly, social listening tools like Brandwatch, Brand24 and Mention are also ideal places to discover trending topics and what the audience is talking about.
Analyze Competitor Content
Check and review top-ranking articles on your topic and see what topics others have covered and what’s missing. Make a list of headings that you think are important for the topic and must be included in your content. Besides that, also list what’s overlooked, like examples, contrasting opinions, case studies, and in-depth content on certain topics. Adding things that are missing in other’s blogs gives your content an edge over others, therefore increasing credibility.
Structuring Long-Form Content for Maximum Readability
Now you have the topic, content references, and outline that you are going to use in your long-form content. However, long-form content can become boring if not written in an engaging and readable manner. Have a look at how to structure long-form content for maximum readability:
Start With a Strong Hook
The beginning of the blog should be interesting, engaging, and intriguing enough to encourage the audience to read the topic further. It can be a quote, a thought-provoking question, a fact, a statistic, a bold statement, or anything else that can hook the reader’s interest immediately.
Add a Compelling Intro
After a strong hook, the intro should also be compelling, engaging, and relevant to keep readers interested. It should tell readers what to expect in the blog and why the content matters. To do that, briefly introduce the topic, explain what value it will provide, and mention the main points to set clear expectations.
Use Captivating Headings and Subheadings
Headings and subheadings make the content clear, readable, and easy to understand for readers. Therefore, use relevant, intriguing, and optimized headings and subheadings to break content into digestible sections. Use the correct and logical hierarchy of heading tags, which means H1 for the main title, H2 for headings, H3 for subheadings, and so on.
Write Concise Paragraphs and Short Sentences
To enhance readability and make content digestible for readers, aim for paragraphs of 2-4 sentences only. Short paragraphs give readers space to breathe and understand the context before jumping to the next one. Also, try to keep one sentence under 20 words for better readability. The best way to achieve this is by introducing only one subtopic in one paragraph, keeping the content focused.
Add Bulleted and Numbered Lists
Wherever possible, use bulleted or numbered lists to simplify complex information and make it easier to scan and understand. Lists highlight the key points in a better way than paragraphs and make content easy for readers to absorb. Even for paragraphs, you can choose relevant sub-heads and write content as listings.
Use Highlighting Technique
Highlight the important points using bolding, italics, underlining, or quotes. Using such things breaks the monotonous text chunk and helps readers to understand the key points easily. You can use bold to emphasize important terms, italics for statistics, underlining for attention, and block quotes for quotes.
End with an Effective Conclusion and Actionable CTA
The conclusion is not just a summary of your content but also an important section of the blog. It tells and reminds users what your blog has provided them. Summarize the key highlights and takeaways of the whole blog and offer actionable advice and suggestions. Lastly, encourage readers to comment, share, or explore more related content on your website.
Effective Writing Tips for Clarity, Engagement, and Depth
Along with being readable, content should also be clear, engaging, and in-depth, especially when it comes to long-form content. When you write such content, it’s crucial to ensure that it should hook the reader’s interest until the end. To do that, follow the effective writing tips for clarity, engagement, and depth below:
Clarity
Know what you want to say: Before starting to write, you should know exactly what you want to tell and convey to the audience. This includes your subject, the main point, and the outline of the whole article.
Use simple and precise language: The audience understands simple and precise language; therefore, avoid technical jargon unless it’s necessary. Along with that, define complex terms, unfamiliar words, and abbreviations, whenever you use them as needed.
Be Concise: Eliminate fluff and unnecessary words and keep the sentences short and to the point. It’s best to keep the sentences under 20 words to make them easy to read and understand. Along with that, you can also use one-sentence paragraphs to make content more scannable.
Don’t use long words: Long words like Tergiversation, Incomprehensibilities, etc., do not serve any purpose in your content. This is because the majority of the audience won’t even understand their meaning, leading to confusion. Therefore, use as simple words as possible to make your content clear and understandable for all the audience.
Consistent tone and style: Make sure that the tone and style of your content match your niche, topic, and audience preference. Whether it’s formal, casual, informal, or conversational, it should be consistent throughout the article. Avoid abrupt shifts in writing tone and style, as they can break readers’ concentration.
Engagement
Know your audience: To maximize engagement, tailor your tone, style, angle, and examples to the readers’ interests and knowledge level. Ensure your audience understands the literary devices, technical words, and examples you add to the content.
Storytelling: Storytelling is a great way to connect with the audience on a personal level and drive their interest and engagement. To do that, add stories, real-life examples, anecdotes, relatable scenarios, or hypothetical situations to draw readers in.
Emotional appeal: Direct content only provides information, but adding emotional appeal allows you to connect with the audience on a deeper level. Using language that evokes emotions like empathy, humor, suspense, intrigue, etc., boosts engagement to the next level.
Visual aids: To make the content engaging and interesting, adding visual aids like images, infographics, charts, etc., that complement your text is the best idea. Visual elements break the large chunks of text, making content easy to understand, which increases engagement.
Depth
Provide context: To add depth to the content, explain the “why” and “how” behind your statements and facts to give readers a deeper understanding. This will show your credibility and authority in the industry and boost your brand reputation.
Offer examples and analogies: The simplest way to add depth and details to the content is by adding examples and analogies. Simplify complex topics and ideas with the help of relatable examples, comparisons, and real-life situations.
Use extensive research: Back up your facts and statements with proper data, statistics, examples, and expert opinions from reputable sources. This not only adds depth to the content but also builds audience trust in your brand, therefore boosting brand loyalty.
SEO and Optimization for Long-Form Content
While writing long-form content, it’s crucial to ensure that it is properly optimized to boost SEO performance and rankings. Have a look at a few important things to consider for SEO and optimization for long-form content:
Perform Keyword Research and Integration
Before starting writing:
- Perform proper keyword research and find out a focus keyword for your article.
- For best results, ensure that the focus keyword has high search volume and low competition.
- Include related keywords and synonyms and long tail keywords as secondary keywords naturally throughout the text.
- Place the keywords in the title, headings, sub-headings, first paragraph, meta description, and URL.
- Place keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing, as it can suspend your website under black hat SEO practices.
Improve Content Readability
Another important aspect of SEO-optimized content is high readability. To do that:
- Break down long content pieces into small digestible parts to make it easy for readers and search engines to understand.
- Use short paragraphs, simple language, subheadings, lists and bullet points, short sentences, etc., to enhance readability.
- Avoid using technical words, long words, and fancy words, as well as utilize whitespace to enhance readability.
Use Proper Content Structure
Proper content structure not only makes content easy to scan and understand but also makes it SEO-friendly. Start your blog with a proper introduction, then add a content body using short paragraphs, and finally end with a conclusion. Break content into sections using subheadings (H2, H3, and so on) for easier readability and better indexing. Add a clickable table of contents for easy user navigation, improving their experience and time spent on the page.
Add Internal and External Links
Internal and external links are two important aspects of SEO optimization to tell Google and visitors that a particular page’s content is valuable. Internal links link to related posts within your website, whereas external links are reference sources to support your content. Links reduce bounce rate, improve user navigation as well as boost credibility and rankings.
Optimize Meta Tags
Meta Title and Description are the two most important aspects of SEO. They basically form the first impression of your content and website on the search engine result page. To capture user’s attention and ensure higher rankings, create a compelling meta title and description that include your main keyword. A properly written meta title boosts your page’s visibility in SERPs. The meta description tells users what they can find out in the blog, thus enticing readers to read the entire page.
Ensure Mobile Friendliness
Mobile is king at present, as the majority of searches come from mobile devices only. Therefore, if you want your long-form content to get higher rankings and succeed, then make sure it’s mobile-friendly. To do that, use responsible design, improve page loading speed, optimize media, and prioritize mobile-friendly navigation. To ensure consistency, use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how your page performs on different devices, screen sizes, and browsers.
Add Multimedia
Multimedia is an important part of long-form content to reduce bounce rate, maintain engagement, and boost time spent. These are three important factors that search engine algorithms consider while ranking content and are, therefore, crucial for SEO. Use high-quality graphics, images, videos, screenshots, charts, infographics, diagrams, etc., to enhance the value of the content. Apart from that, make sure to use compressed files and include alt text in images for better SEO optimization.
Promote your Content
Social media sharing boosts traffic and engagement on your posts, which ultimately signals to search engine algorithms that content is valuable. There are two simple ways to promote your content: first, by yourself and second, with the help of readers. You can promote your content through social media, SEO, and email yourself. However, for the second one, you have to encourage your readers to share your content on their social media channels. Use a call to action to make it easy for readers to share your content on social media platforms and foster high reach and engagement.
Editing and Proofreading – The Final Task Before Publishing
Mistakes are common when it comes to long-form content writing. No matter how professional you are, typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, missing words, unclear sentence structure, etc., are some common mistakes. To rectify such mistakes and ensure that content is polished, error-free, and impactful, proper editing and proofreading are important. Have a look at how to edit and proofread your content before publishing:
Take a Break
After completing the content, never start proofreading and editing immediately, as there is a high chance that you may overlook some minor errors. Step away from it for some time and refresh your mind. This helps you return to the content with fresh eyes and a more focused mindset, which can catch all mistakes.
Check Content Structure and Flow
Ensure that the content is written in a logical order from introduction to conclusion with clear connections between sections. Verify that the key points of the content are clear, concise, and understandable for the audience. Ensure that the tense, tone, style, and formatting of the content are consistent throughout the blog.
Ensure Grammar and Punctuation Correctness
Punctuation and grammar mistakes are most common during long-form content writing. The best way to check such grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes requires a combination of using tools and manual checking. You can use popular tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, etc., to check grammar and punctuation.
Check Clarity and Conciseness
Check whether your ideas are well-structured and correctly presented with relevant facts, statistics, and data. Eliminate repetitive information and replace difficult words with simple ones for better readability. Also, ensure that sentence length and structure are readable and understandable for the audience.
Perform Fact-Checking and Accuracy
Verify the information once again by cross-checking data, statistics, facts, and other important statements to ensure their accuracy. To show the credibility of your information, it’s best to cite reliable sources using citations and hyperlinks.
Read Aloud
The simplest way to spot errors easily and effortlessly is by reading the content aloud. This helps you catch awkward phrasing, improper structure, run-on sentences, and other common errors. This also allows you to check whether the content has a natural flow or is breaking the focus while reading.
Consider Peer Review or Professional Editor
If you think editing is not your cup of tea, it’s best to get help from others. Consider a colleague, friend, peer, or professional editor to review your content and catch errors. Fresh perspectives can easily uncover common mistakes that you may have overlooked. They can also provide detailed reviews and valuable input on style, structure, grammar, and clarity.
Publishing and Promoting Long-Form Content
Once your long-form content is edited and polished, it’s time to publish and promote it effectively to maximize its reach and engagement. Have a look at the best approaches to publish and promote Long-form Content.
Publishing Your Long Form Content
Choose the Right Platform: To get maximum reach and engagement, publish your long-form content on the right platform. You can publish it as a blog on your website or relevant platforms like LinkedIn, Medium, and other niche platforms.
Optimize for SEO Before Publishing: Ensure that your meta title, description, keywords, links, and URL are properly optimized for search engines. Also, check the image optimization and alt tags of images before final publishing.
Publishing Your Content: Link to your existing content as well as reliable external sources to boost credibility. Ensure that the content is easy to read and navigate on mobile devices. Finally, hit the publish button to make your content live on the search engine results page.
Promoting Long-Form Content
Promote on Social Media: Use high-quality visuals like images, videos, etc., to promote your content on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Use relevant and trending hashtags to improve their reach and visibility to the target audience.
Send Email Newsletters: To drive more traffic, share glimpses, teasers, and announcements of your content with your email subscribers. Highlight the key takeaways and benefits they can get after reading the blog to create interest.
Utilize Paid Promotions: Consider Google Ads to promote your content using paid marketing methods to drive high traffic and engagement. You can also use Facebook or Instagram ads to promote your content and boost reach.
Conclusion
Long-form content is an effective and one of the best approaches to improve SEO performance, boost rankings, and increase reach and traffic. We have discussed a complete guide on writing long-form content to help you master this format. From choosing the right topic to final publishing and promotion, this blog goes into depth about every aspect of long-term content. The deep research techniques mentioned in this blog help you find valuable and in-depth content on any topic. We have also mentioned writing tips and how to structure such content for maximum readability, clarity, and engagement. So, consider this comprehensive guide and create long-form content to take your credibility and brand presence to the next level.
