Is the Length of Your Content Affecting Your Conversions?

2 comments, 13/01/2013, by , in General

Content LengthFor years, most bloggers have made many considerations in regards to how they publish content. At first, it was rather easy to game the system and push a particular website to the top of search engine results through mundane means. As time has passed, however, many more considerations regarding the content quality have also come into the equation. This has left many wondering whether or not content quantity matters – and if there is a consistent correlation. The following covers the basics of this premise and renders a clear verdict as to whether it is effective or not.

Is There A Threshold?

One area that is great to inspect are SERPs (search engine results pages), which can quickly display the top performing websites for any keyword. After analysing thousands of SERPs for consistencies and commonalities, it was discovered that virtually none of top results’ averages in any instance had a page word length of less than 2,000 words. While four pages of typed material may seem like a lot of content for each page, there does seem to be a consistent factor in improving your exposure by publishing more original content on each of your pages.

What About Links?

If you’ve been concerned with pinging your website‘s new updates and postings to search engines in order to improve your chance at backlinks, listen up: sites with more average words per page have a higher amount of links received than sites that have less content. Generally, pages that have more creative or otherwise valuable content are more likely to be distributed by individuals through traditional electronic communication as well as social media. Sites that have more than 2,000 words per page in aggregate have been shown to receive approximately 20% more links than sites that have less than 1,500 words per page.

Does It Affect Social Sharing?

How does this seemingly traditional and even outdated measurement translate into social media conversions? It would appear that it translates quite well – blogs with more than 1,500 posts shared an unbelievable 65% increase in distribution on Twitter and a 25% increase in distribution on Facebook. There is also another consideration: search engines read and determine rankings based off of social signals as well. We are now reaching the point where social sharing is leaving a similar footprint to that of pinging your website for backlinks. With this information in mind, you would be misled if you were not already considering the addition of new content to your existing pages and posts for additional social distribution.

Keyword Length

Even the length of your keywords is now something to consider. At one point, the average search term fell in between two and three words. Now, we are seeing the average shift to four, five, even six words per search query. In knowing this, you can build keywords around the area where statistically you are most likely to match up numerically in search – or at the very least, have keyword phrases that each are a different number of words in length. By covering all these segments, you can reach individuals who are more likely to search both complex and simple variations of a subject.






2 comments

  1. Daniele
    January 19th, 2013 16:30

    Thanks, can you point out where those results are coming from?
    I always publish posts in the range of 500-600 words and they came as a surprise.

    Thanks

    Reply

  2. January 23rd, 2013 3:12

    Keeping your content simple and short is essential and invite more readers to your website/blog.

    Reply

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