Creating long form content is important to establish an effective online engagement. Delivering high-quality long form content provides readers with several benefits that include improved writing performance and high engagement of audiences. With long-form content, you can gain in-depth knowledge and utilise it to deliver several other posts in your niche. A proper understanding of the needs and preferences of the target audience, a structured format, and thorough research will help you generate valuable content.

Continue reading this blog to learn more about how to create long form content for better engagement and rank higher in search results.

What Is Long Form Content?

Long-form content means written, audio or visual content with over 1000 words in length. To be a truly long form, the content must have depth. It should dive deep into the topic and provide helpful insights to readers. This form of content also lasts for more than 30 minutes for podcasts or videos and provides valuable information to the target audience.

To meet SEO-related purposes, long-form content should have interesting and valuable information to engage the reader, stay on the page longer and improve the bounce rate. Lengthy content expresses your expertise on the topic and establishes trust among the audience.

How to Create and Rank Long Form Content?

Creating and ranking long-form content needs in-depth research of articles that provide additional value to readers while following the SEO best practices. To rank long-form content, it is essential to use relevant long-tailed keywords following structured formatting to improve the visibility in search engine results.

Delivering quality long-form content not only attracts traffic but also builds up trust and authority with the target audience. Let’s look into the elements to consider for optimising long form content for better engagement through effective content optimization.

Begin with Keyword Research

Before writing long-form content, conduct a thorough research of keywords relating to the topic and target specifically a low-competition keyword. Make sure to carry out this step correctly and carefully as it will ultimately help to determine your content success in search engines. Use easily available tools on the internet to make your keyword search task effortless. Two popular tools used for keyword research are Ahrefs and Semrush.

Optimise and Clean Your URL

Presenting shorter and cleaner URLs helps search engine understand better the content of your post and thus also provides a better user experience. Keeping the URLs clean and concise also makes it easier for search engine to crawl and get an overview of the content posted on your page. This raises the ranking in search engine. Focus on creating a simple URL aligning with the content of your page, ensuring a user-friendly browsing experience.

Focus on Long Tailed Keywords

By now, you must have understood to focus on primary and secondary keywords search while writing long form content. However, the importance of targeting long-tailed keywords is overlooked. Long-tailed keywords face lesser competition and make the content easier to rank while attracting high traffic. Focusing on long-tailed keywords, you can navigate into niche segments of your audience and deliver content that meets their needs, ultimately generating more secured leads to your site.

Use a Proper H1 Tag

The H1 tag is the first and foremost thing people notice while landing at your blog post. Typically, the H1 tag denotes the title of your blog post. Providing a clear and concise H1 tag creates a significant impact on your search engine ranking. Alongside, it enables search engine to index your content properly. To post an H1 tag, make sure to follow the following points:

1. Make H1 short and simple
2. Generate a clear idea for your blog post
3. Target for a long-tailed keyword

Add Inbound Links

Internal links are links that direct you from one page of a website to another page of the same address. Thus, Google while crawling can find out the relevancy of content on that particular page easily. Inbound links are popular among content marketers and smart bloggers.

There are several benefits of inbound links, some of which are:

1. Boosts ranking of certain targeted keywords
2. Enables search engines to easily crawl your site
3. Provides audience with further reading options
4. Allows you to promote some paid services

Add Outbound Links

Similar to inbound links, linking your post to related pages in your niche is crucial and it signals Google that your page consists of high-quality content. Alongside, Google can also point out your post to be of higher quality. With outbound links, search engine can analyse the relevance of your topic and rank your page accurately. Adding outbound links not only boosts SEO but also builds trust and confidence with your target audience.

Add Proper Subheadings

In a blog post, H2, H3 and H4 tags denote subheadings. Subheadings are used for breaking up contents for easy to follow. This thereby allows readers to easily navigate and address your content better. Incorporating good subheadings increases readability scores and enhances SEO-optimised content. From an SEO perspective, subheadings provide relevant structure to your content and help search engines point out the relevant information in your article. This will thereby result in better indexing with higher ranking in search results.

Optimise Your Title Tag

Title tags are essential to enhance the visibility of pages in SERPs. This tag is the first and foremost thing people view when your content pops up in the search results. To clarify further, a title tag is the title of each result on a search engine. While framing the title tag of your page, make sure to focus on long-tailed keywords and describe the benefits the page offers. If you mean to target some specific audiences, such as content writers in the US, find relevant keywords catering to their search behaviour. This thereby enhances your chances of getting ranked well in those queries.

Optimise Your Meta Description for SEO

A meta description is a snippet that provides a summary of the page’s content. Usually, the length of the meta description is maintained in 160 characters. Similar to the title page, the meta description of your page also lets you rank higher in the search engine results.

For optimising your meta description, follow the key points below:

1. Provide a clear, concise and descriptive meta-description
2. Consider a focus keyword
3. Maintain the length in about 160 characters
4. Contain a call to action (CTA) tone

Add Your Target Keyword and Related Keywords

In your blog post, make sure to include your focus keyword. Thus, Google will understand the importance of focusing on keywords while crawling your content. Incorporate some low-competition keywords in your content to focus more on long-tailed keywords.

Most importantly, include your keyword in the last paragraph of your article and subheadings in some cases. Authoritative content writers can balance the placement of keywords without overdoing it and maintain SEO effectiveness with natural readability.

Conclusion

To conclude, creating high-quality long-form content lets you focus on SEO writing, understand your target audience, plan a well-organised structure and conduct research on the topic. Looking into the interests of readers is equally important to engage them in content and provide information that adds value. Implementing these strategies is crucial for crafting SEO-optimised long-form content and reaching higher rank in search engines. Ultimately, the main goal is to add value in content to readers while making content engaging. Considering these techniques, your long-form content will be successful to attract and convert audiences effectively.