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As an industry, SEOs have absorbed the message that ‘short is sweet’. We know that the attention span of surfers is limited. They don’t tend to luxuriate in the written word, enjoying writing for writing’s sake. Instead they want short, informative, actionable content without the clutter of unnecessary verbosity. We’ve also fully taken on board the idea that content should be pitched at the lowest possible reading level, so as not to alienate potential readers and customers.

When done well, short, simple content is great. When done badly, it results in either content that is so thin it isn’t worth reading at all, or content that appears to be aimed at an audience who have just put aside their copy of Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes.

It’s become blogger lore that content should be written in this way; however, there are quite a few reasons, both from the perspective of SEO, and from the perspective of content marketing, that adding longer form content written for educated adults into the mix can actually bring some noticeable benefits to corporate blogs and websites.

Greater Keyword Potential

It’s often beneficial to include a keyphrase and various synonyms in a post. With short content, cramming as many variations as possible in can lead to stilted, unnatural articles that are unpleasant to read. Long form content naturally lends itself to multiple variations on a theme. It needn’t even be deliberate. As content grows longer, in an effort to avoid repetition, it becomes necessary to mix up the vocabulary, capturing a bunch of extra long tail keywords in a way which is also favorable stylistically.

Demonstrate Intelligence and Knowledge

There’s no better way to show that you’re smart, informed, and capable of understanding and creating complex arguments that are relevant to your field than to produce well-written, long form content. There’s nothing wrong with short articles that give the highlights: explaining the benefits of a product or service, or offering concise actionable insights. However, sometimes people do require evidence that there is some original thinking going on, rather than the apparent regurgitation of conclusions reached by others.

Increased Ranking

There’s some evidence that longer content produces increased search engine rankings. Last year, SerpIQ conducted a study that showed that over the SERP results for 20,000 keywords, on average the top 10 results included textual content in excess of 2000 words.

In line with that finding there is also evidence that longer content tends to attract more links than shorter articles.

Increased Conversions

This one is a little less clear cut, but there is anecdotal evidence that having long form content on a page results in a greater conversion rate. You should always do your own split testing, but QuickSprout’s testing of their pages found that a version exceeding 1000 words produces a 7% higher conversion rate than one with only 400 words.

All this shouldn’t be taken as encouragement to artificially inflate content with unnecessary fluff; sometimes articles are short for good reason, but it should lead SEOs and content marketers to reconsider their hesitation to produce rich, long, well-crafted and argued pieces of content that will educate and encourage widespread sharing.