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I’ve never been one for levity when it comes to my writing. This has always been an issue. Day to day, I don’t necessarily talk a lot, but when I write I want to be thorough. I want the piece of writing to be properly structured, properly introduced, the subject matter explored from multiple angles, perhaps some opinion or commentary fused in, followed by a conclusion. Of course, this changes depending on what I’m writing: I’ve taught myself how to get to the point in a press release. I’ve taught myself not to drone on in an e-mail. But I’ve always hated the fact that it’s consistently drilled into people that the most successful blog posts and internet writing are short, 300-500 word posts.
That might not be the case anymore.
Marketing Pilgrim recently summarized a report released by Searchmetrics, an SEO and research firm. In this, they found a few interesting conclusions that could be very important for online writers and marketers:
• Content:High quality, relevant content ranks better on average, and is identifiable by properties such as comprehensive wording in regard to the co-occurrence of related terms in the context, a higher word-count and media enrichment
• Technology: A well optimized technical performance of a page contributes to a good ranking, such as, robust site architecture with an optimal internal linking structure, short loading times and presence of meta tags.
• Backlinks: The quantity and quality of backlinks remains crucial as there are many new features introduced this year that have been revised to improve the quality of the results.
• Social Signals: The correlation values regarding coefficients out of the social sector have slightly decreased. The growth of the average total number of signals per position was rather small.
• User Signals: For the first time, user signals were measured and as expected there is a relation between rankings and higher click-through rates, lower bounce rates and a high time-on-site. (Credit: Searchmetrics)
Average Ranking vs. Length of Text Post Source: Searchmetrics Report
Most important to note in this situation is the idea that a higher word count could leader to better search rankings. This, of course, is still very much interdependent on strong content. Writing pages of nonsense will serve no purpose – but it appears that people on the Internet are open to reading more in 2014 than they were just one year ago. Perhaps this indicates why site like Medium have caught on.
Very important to note is that, although readers are open to reading more, the ease of reading must also be considerably high. The top sites on Google, as determined by Searchmetrics through using the classic Flesch-value scale, are those sites that could easily be read by a 13 to 15 year old.
Additionally, key words are of utmost importance. In terms of Google rankings, all of your text means nothing if your key words are not directly related. Google will not rank highly those pages that use random keywords in an attempt to pick up more readers.
So, if this information proves correct, more long-winded writers like myself have reasons to rejoice: as long as we keep our writing easy to read and our keywords on point, we might now have the opportunity to write more online!
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