It’s no secret that longer content tends to perform better in search results. There are numerous studies that have confirmed just that, the longer your articles the more likely they are to rank well.
That makes sense when you think about it. Longer content tends to be more in-depth, give more details, and all around provide a better value to the reader. That’s why most SEO guides will give you target word counts to hit that typical push well past 1k words. While word count is the end all of article quality, it’s generally a pretty good indicator.
In this article, I want to detail some of the tricks I use to help increase the length of my articles. I do this in an effort to increase the value of my articles and make sure that I completely cover a topic in multiple ways. The key phrase there is value, keep that in mind as you go through these tips.
Be Careful About Your Length
Before we jump in I just wanted to throw out a word of caution on increasing your word count just to do so. The end goal of any article is to match the search intent of your readers and get them the best information as quickly as possible. Sometimes that takes 5,000 words to do, while in other cases you can do it adequately in 800.
I usually don’t start my articles with any word count in mind. I know generally where I want to be but I write for the reader not to some arbitrary word count. Not every article needs to be a short novel to provide value.
Keep that in mind while you’re working through this article. If you find yourself repeating yourself or writing overly verbose sentences just to hit a word count that’s usually a bad sign. Not every topic needs thousands of words, and that’s perfectly okay. I see lots of articles under 1k words all the time that rank well. The key is to adequately cover a topic, if you do that then you’ll write a good article.
With that out of the way, onto the tips.
Use Multiple Sources For Research
One of the best things you can do to add more meat to your article is to use multiple sources as reference. What I’ve found is that different articles will tend to focus on different things or cover a particular part of a topic more in depth than others.
This provides you opportunities to not only increase the length of your article, but also to simply provide better content. If article 1 is missing a sub-topic that article 2 has, that's a good opportunity to combine the two and make an article that is longer and more thorough.
When I’m researching a new article I tend to go through at least 3-5 sources before I even start writing. I take the key points each of these articles covers and use that to generate an outline.
In most cases, I’ll find that each article was missing something that another had. This then lets me compile it all down to a single source, and ultimately helps my article stand out from the rest. Instead of having to go through 2 or 3 articles, a reader can now just come to mine and get all the information in one place.
Notice how my focus is on the reader and not the word count. More words naturally come from making my article better, but it wasn’t necessarily my focus. That’s a key theme that bears repeating here, and you should keep that at the forefront of your article writing strategy when going through the next couple tips. Keep reader value at the front of your mind and words will naturally grow because of that.
Provide An Overview Or Summary
Another strategy I’ve been using is to put a high level overview or quick facts at the beginning of my articles. An end of article summary also works well for similar reasons. For me, this accomplishes two goals:
First, it provides a nice summary that is easy to digest. This can help someone get into the right mindset at the start of an article, or recap what they went over to keep ideas fresh in their mind. This is also a good way to get value to your reader quickly; instead of having to dig through an article they can get some quick facts right away. I also find it a nice place to put interesting information/facts that might not fit well elsewhere in the article.
Secondly, it does increase my word count. Once again, this is a bi-product of providing value and not the main goal.
What types of content that fit here depend on your niche, but you can get creative and come up with some ideas. Here’s a couple that might fit for you depending on your niche
- -A list of needed supplies
- -Initial safety or warnings
- -A bullet list of what you’re going to or did cover in the article
- -Quick facts or information that is relevant but doesn’t fit in any of your subheadings
- -Resources for additional information
- -Personal anecdotes or details on your experience
Use an FAQ
Another technique that I like to use is to add a frequently asked questions section at the end of my articles. This is a fantastic way to cover some fringe keywords that are related, but might be hard to naturally work into your article. It also naturally increases your word count by packing additional content into your article.
Here’s a tip for finding good questions, simple search on Google for “Your Topic + FAQ”. In most cases, you’ll see as part of the result a section titled “People also ask”. These are ready made topics that you already know people are interested in learning, so why not add them to your article for some extra juice.
You also get the added benefit of potentially ranking in one of these spots for these phrases. Similar to featured snippets, it gives you a new way to rank without needing to necessarily outrank any of the competing pages. Obviously you’ll still need to create a good, rankable article, but I’ve found in some cases I’ll end up in this list of questions without having my article rank that highly.
Provide Relevant Extras
My last tip is to think about adding extra sections that add auxiliary but still relevant information.
For example, I have a site that talks about growing herbs. In many of the articles I’ll add a brief section that talks briefly about some of the culinary uses of the herb in question. This isn’t strictly related to growing herbs, but is probably interesting to the majority of people doing so.
One thing I’m cautious of when doing this is to make sure it doesn’t detract from the main point of my article. If someone wants to learn how to grow chives, for example, then I don’t want to bombard them with cooking tips. That might drive them off-site as they’ll start to get the impression that this is a culinary focused site and not one about gardening.
To offset that, I tend to put this type of content deeper in the article and visually separate it from the main content. I’ll typically treat it as its own card with a different background and clear header. That way, people can clearly see what it’s about, and skip it if it’s not interesting to them. The user’s intent is always the focus, but I provide extra details for those interested in expanding their knowledge a bit.
Write For The Reader Not The Count
As I noted before, content marketing should always be focused on user intent and providing a value that matches that. That should always take precedence over article length; a long article that doesn’t solve the reader’s problem is basically worthless. Remember, you’re not writing to satisfy some word count god, you’re writing to solve your reader’s problems, and that should always be the number one priority in your content. Everything else comes second.