Does Content Length Matter?

In inbound marketing, content is king; we all know that. Your blogs, website, and other marketing strategies need to have remarkable content, attracting new potential customers and delighting them throughout the buying process. While there’s a lot of expert advice out there about how to create this content, it doesn’t always focus on how much of it needs to be created. Is there a specific amount? Actually, according to Google, there is.

The average web page that ranks number one organically on Google has over 2,000 words of content. Wow! In fact, the more words a web page has, the higher it ranks:

This should have an impact on your content marketing strategy for a few reasons:

Focus on Quality, Not Quantity

There’s definitely something to be said for getting quick pieces out to take advantage of a newsjacking opportunity, but that should be a small part of your content marketing. Instead of just focusing on pushing out thousands of pages of content, you need to focus on putting out quality pieces. Blogs are one area that a lot of inbound marketers have trouble with this, trying to saturate their market everyday with new content and social media shares. It’s a better idea to produce pieces that are in-depth, don’t contain much fluff and are evergreen. If a piece of content is still valuable to read six months or even two years from now, you’ll reap many more rewards in the long run.

More Content Means More Natural Links

Both inbound and outbound links are an important piece of the SEO pie. They not only drive page views to the internal page you’re referencing, but they tell Google a lot about your authority and the authority of the pages at the other end of your links. So, it is pretty easy to deduce from that more content will mean more links, and more links are better for your SEO rankings. And these links will be the good, natural kind, not the forced, spammy versions that Google penalizes.

Longer Pages Get More Social Shares

According to a recent experiment, blog posts that were over 1,500 words were shared much more often than those under 1,500 words on Twitter and Facebook. It found that if a post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than a post that is under 1,500 words. Not only is an in-depth page better for your organic rankings, it will get shared more often by your social followers. And guess what- more social media shares will be better for your organic rankings. An in-depth article’s benefits go full circle!

Whether it is product pages, blog posts or anything else, if you want more traffic and higher conversions, you should be creating longer form copy. Beyond anything else, it’s the best way to really inform your potential customers, which is what inbound marketing is all about. If you’re ready to move forward, but not sure how, download our free eBook The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.