This means that our content strategies are going to have to be taken up a notch in order for us to the rankings we want to get. We used to able to rank content that was 300 to 500 words in length but now that is not the case. Recent studies have shown that out of the sites that appear in the search results for the top 20,000 keywords and phrases, the top ten results had an average of 2000 or more words on the page. We have known for years that long copy out performs short copy and this is further proof.
Why long copy is best?
Let me explain why long copy is what the search engines are looking for. When it comes to writing content, it is fairly easy to crank out 500 word articles all day long, but writing 1000, 1500, 2000 or 2500 words is more difficult. They consider the longer content to be more authoritative and better researched than the shorter content which is true of course. Another recent study showed that content with 1500 words or more got more likes, tweets, retweets and links that copy shorter than 1500 words. Not only that, it had a much higher return on investment.The conversion rate specialist over at http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/, revamped the landing page for SEOMoz for their Pro level offering. Before, it was a much shorter copy that converted but not and really great numbers. They discovered that when the owner of SEOmoz did a presentation for the Pro level of service they offer that it took several minutes for him to really give a quality presentation yet the page could be scanned in a minute or so. So by creating longer copy the reflected the length of a presentation with several conversion elements in the copy, SEOmoz gained significantly higher conversions adding $1million to their bottom line in a year.
Adding more content to your site
I recently watched as a couple of website owner I know took down two of their websites and took all the content from those two sites and put it all on their main site. Their main site went from 158 pages of indexed content to over 500. When I ran a report on their site the following month, they had gone from 64 positions in the SERPS to 232...all from adding content to their site. They did no backlinking to the content. They only took the well written content and added to their site and the rankings for specific phrases immediately increased.We have done this with several of our sites including taking shorter content and combining with other shorter content and seen websites that had hardly no positioning begin to flourish and rank just by adding longer and more copy.
It is imperative that you get a really great content strategy. Put your best content on your site and they use video, article directories, web 2.0 and social sites to distribute other content linking back to your site. Adding great content on a weekly basis is a must for you and your business.
Call us if you have questions about your content strategy...337-303-2841
