Why Does a Website Need Long Texts?

September

2020

Recent research has found that long content ranks much better and also has other advantages that are needed only some of the time. So when is a longread appropriate, and what are its pros and cons?

What is a longread?

A text is considered long when it has more than 1000-1500 words. In essence, it is very specific, thoroughly presented material where users can find complete, detailed answers to the questions they care about.

Such a text is well structured and skillfully supplemented with various multimedia elements, which makes it much easier to take in and draws the target audience's attention to the brand or its product. The following features show that a text is a longread:

a large volume of material — over 1000 words;
depth of coverage, which means that texts of moderate length can also count as longreads if they are worked through carefully and in depth.

So text length is far from the main factor affecting a website's ranking — what matters to search algorithms is:

no generic phrases or errors;
originality and uniqueness of the text;
practical usefulness and informational value;
good semantics;
relevance to search queries, and so on.

What are the advantages of a longread?

The clear advantages of long text materials include:

the long format gives a good opportunity to cover every question and give detailed, very complete answers;
it is impossible to over-optimize by adding synonyms and extra words — they fit perfectly into a long text and do not feel excessive;
higher text uniqueness;
more backlinks thanks to attractive graphic or multimedia elements;
easy conversion into other text formats — for posts, blogs, forums, social media and so on.

Disadvantages of long texts

Along with the pros, there are some cons:

it is hard to hold the attention of interested users;
readers may stop reading if the material does not seem interesting from the very start;
lack of formatting;
use of a font that is too small and hard to notice;
a longread is expensive to create.

Do modern websites need long-format texts?

Longreads are hard to rank at the top, because such large texts often exceed the word limit. This format lets readers get the maximum amount of useful, good-quality information with high practical value.

To properly assess whether a longread on a particular topic is worth writing, you need to carefully analyze the search results. As a rule, the top pages feature text materials of varying length and depth.

Search engines show at the top the sites that best meet user expectations. To do this, they analyze hundreds of signals.

In a long text, the risk of the site ranking for off-target keywords rises significantly, which can increase the bounce rate if users cannot find the information they need there.

If you need qualified advice on whether a longread would be useful for your website, order the services of our company "Marketing MIX", which has extensive experience in this field and a whole team of excellent specialists. Trust us with your problems and get an excellent result.

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