Why Long-Form Content Is Important (And How To Do It?)

Nowadays, most people turn to the internet for answers to their questions. Some questions can be answered in a single paragraph, but others require a more thoughtful, detailed approach.

These questions give you the chance to attract valuable attention to your website while establishing your authority on an industry-related subject.

By incorporating long-form articles into your marketing strategy, you increase your chances of gaining advantages in terms of lead generation, SEO, and, as a result, revenue.

In this article, our Miami digital marketing experts will explain what long-form content is and how you can create it as part of your overall marketing strategy.

What Is Long-Form Content?

Long-form content is content that either provides a lot of information or goes into great detail about a specific topic. When creating longer-form content, you can use a word count between 1,000 and 2,000.

Typically, the word count is heavily influenced by various factors, such as:

• Topic
• Scope of the Subject
• Intended Goals
• Target Audience

Long-form content is meant to be read through, not just skimmed over. This means it’s important to base it on context with a lot of research behind it.

It's not your usual article that tries to cram as many relevant keywords as possible onto one page. It needs to be exciting, have the appropriate format to rank well, and be helpful to readers.

Some long-form content formats that can be used are articles, white papers, downloadable e-books, guides, and reports.

How To Write Long Form Content?

Step 1: Research and pick topics that are relevant to a niche.

Creating lengthy and in-depth content is a difficult task. Every subject requires extensive research and thoughtful consideration when creating great content that will be useful to your audience.

The first step is to research both your audience and the industry to understand better the topics that are likely to be of greater interest to your readers.

Keep in mind that the goal of your article should be to help people find a solution to a problem or gain a new understanding of how to improve.

In addition, you must ensure that the topics you select are relevant to the keywords for which you want to rank highly. You can look at your competitor's websites to see which keywords they rank high for and which articles are getting the most traffic.

Alternatively, you can read various resources that rank well for specific keywords and brainstorm topics that you can combine to provide all the essential details in one article.

Step 2: Outline the parts of the content.

After you've decided on topics, you'll need to create an outline of those topics. Write down the main headings and subheadings for each topic section as you think of them. This will help to broaden the available research capabilities.

Here are three content outline generators you can use:

• Fill In The Blanks Template by Hub Spot: This is an excellent outline for a simple blog post, but it's short. It can get you between 500 and 1,000 words, but you should take the whole thing and make it longer for an excellent modern blog post.
• Homework Sheet by Content Rules: This template from Content Rules comes as a PDF. It works more like a worksheet. It puts each part of a blog post in order and asks you to put what you want there, following a few simple rules. ‍
• Post Template by Writers Write: This template is an infographic-style list of the parts of a blog post laid out interestingly. It can help you with layouts and how the different parts of a post fit together.

Remember that the key to writing captivating long-form content is to give each section as much attention to detail as possible.

Step 3: Use a content calendar.

You'll need to create a content calendar once you've decided on the topics for your articles. You can use a content calendar to determine the target dates for each article's publication while considering the need to allow enough time for marketing and sharing.

Don't forget to include information such as the target keyword, audience, transition target, relevant resources, and topic breakdown in your content calendar.

Here are the top content calendar tools recommended by our Miami digital marketing experts:

• HubSpot's Downloadable Template for Excel: This tool functions as a social media content planner, tracker, and archive, making it ideal for sharing your social strategy. It’s also useful for repurposing old content.
• Loomly: This tool can do both organic and paid social. And if your team doesn't want to use their accounts for social media work, they can respond to comments and questions in Loomly. This means they won't have to log in to each platform's native app to talk to followers.
• Trello: This tool allows users to make their labels with different publication statuses so that the whole team can see how their social media posts are coming along. Trello’s labels could also show which social networks are used to share the content.

Using these tools when writing long-form content will definitely help you focus on the task.

Step #4: Engage the reader.

A long-form piece of content is a lengthy article that will take some time to read. It is therefore critical to keep the content engaging. Even if the content is valuable, people may lose interest in reading it if it appears stale.

Here are some things you can do to attract more attention:

• Start your article with a Table of Contents section that lists all topics you'll cover.
• Instead of writing long paragraphs to explain the sections of your article, use subheadings to break down each heading further.
• Make an effort to provide statistics and reports on the topics you cover.
• Include images that will assist your audience in visually connecting with your content. This will help to reduce the bounce rate.
• Consider making videos and incorporating them into the article as needed.

The audience will be more engaged with your content if it is better organized and optimized.

Step 5: Optimize your long-form content for SEO.

Optimizing your long-form content for search engines is one of the most critical steps in creating that content.

You can use the help of plugins to determine where you might be falling short in terms of keyword optimization, readability optimization, and other quality factors.

To help you fine-tune your long-form content's SEO, you can use the tools mentioned in this article: Top 5 Must-Have SEO Extensions for Google Chrome.

Another tip is to ensure you're not keyword spamming, which means you shouldn't overuse your target keyword or use it in places that don't make sense.

You should also include a meta description that explains to the audience precisely what they can expect to gain from reading this article.

Don't Stop Creating Long-Form Content

We hope that we were able to assist you in understanding and planning long-form content. With practice, you will improve your conversion rates.

Creating long-form content takes time. You need to have patience, keep the content on-brand, and eventually you'll be able to see which visitors have become repeat visitors or, even better, loyal followers over time.

Don't be afraid to seek assistance in creating and optimizing your long-form content.

At Digital Resource, our content marketing team will assist you in creating and curating long-form content for your website and social media pages that will undoubtedly attract your viewers.

Contact us today for a free consultation!