Long-form content is very popular over the internet. Most bloggers believe that it is easy to rank long form content.
Remember that the ranking systems not only check the length of your copy. It also checks the quality of your content.
Google wants to give the best and most researched results to its users. Days are gone when 500 words articles rank out the researched content with few backlinks.
Now the first parameter of ranking long form content is its quality and richness.
If you are a blogger or have a long copy of content that you write your own and want to rank it higher. Then you are at the right place because you will learn what are the important factors that directly affect the visibility of long-form content.
Let’s look at them:
1. Loading Speed
Everybody knows that page speed is a ranking factor and slow-loading pages never rank in SERPs. This is the reason many themes are updated frequently in a month to improve their loading time.
Unfortunately, we have observed that most of the site owners do not pay attention to the loading speed of their sites.
They think that only having high-quality content on their site can repeat their customers. But this is not 100% true.
High-quality content that is not loading fast is useless for users and search engines.
This means the first thing that you need to improve is your site speed.
A. How to Improve Site Loading Speed?
The first thing you need to check is your theme speed. Some themes are heavy and slow loading. Themes like Divi are fast and have tonnes of the latest features.
You can create any type of site by using a single theme (Divi).
Next check the server response time and bandwidth. Shared hosting plans are always slow and have less bandwidth.
Multiple sites are hosted on a single server and they share the space and speed.
Shared hosting is good when you have a new site and your site traffic is less than 50 visitors per day.
If you have more visitors per day then you need dedicated hosting. In these plans, you have dedicated server space and speed for your website.
In short, the speed and space are reserved for your site visitors.
B. Reduce Image Size
There are many free tools that you can use to compress or crop large-size images. At this time many browsers serve images in webp format.
Convert your JPG or PNG images to webp format.
If it is not possible due to some reason. Then you must compress the existing images to reduce their total pixel size.
Also, install a lazy loading plugin. These plugins let the content load first and then slowly load the images to a page.
The good news is most of the best lazy-loading plugins are free.
2. Rich Content
None of the articles is complete without images. Adding relevant images to an article increases its chances of going viral and ranking higher.
In a survey, we found that people spend more time on pages that contain images, infographics, videos, etc.
This helps to hook the visitors for a long time and also reduces the bounce rate. The low bounce rate and high average time on the page tell the search engine that this particular article is most relevant to the query.
Because most of the visitors spend enough time on the page and read the entire article.
Hence search engines promote such pages by showing them in the top results.
3. Insert Links
Links are important for long form content. Because it is a deeply researched piece of content and every researched content has some external links to support it.
This tells the search engines that this content is pointing to many external sources and this means it is researched content.
This type of content gets first preference.
Next comes the internal links, they are equally important. Having 5 to 7 internal links in 2000 to 2500 words article is beneficial.
This signals that your long form content has some relevancy with your already existing content. This improves the domain authority and authority in the industry.
4. Sharing It
The last and most important step to rank long form content is sharing it over the internet. There are many places where you can find people of your industry.
Reddit is the best example where you can find people from different industries.
Search for your field, join the community and share your researched content with others. Ask them for feedback.
Then improve it according to feedback. This way you will know how to write properly and what people in your industry want to read.
Content shared on Reddit generally goes viral if it is researched and to the point (no fluff).
5. Update Your Content
Keep updating your long form content. An update does not mean rewriting it completely. To update your content, add some more relevant images.
Make some changes in the paragraphs, and add some important and latest information.
For example, if your content is about the best handy cameras of all time. Add the latest models of cameras and also add new lenses.
At a time, you can add or remove 200 to 250 words in 2000 words article. Do not go crazy and make huge changes at once.
If you do so you will surely see changes in your ranking. Because a single article not only ranks for one keyword. It ranks for multiple related keywords that you have not even researched. They are just automatically added to the content while writing it.
Conclusion
Researched and well-organized content always ranks higher than thin content. Try to add quality to your articles. Do not re-write what is already available on the internet.
Do some research and make a unique piece of content. Improve site speed, add images and see your content ranking better.
To know why your content is not ranking higher than your competition. Just hit the Free SEO Audit button and we will tell you what is the problem with your content.