Ranking wise; Long article or multiple smaller ones?

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

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The question is straightforward, which form of articles tend to rank better?

I'm working on a new blog now which would be mainly informational and covering a broad topic in a highly competitive niche.

I found an area within this niche with too many (thousands) low difficulty keywords with 500+ search volume, hundreds of medium difficulty keywords with 10k+ search volume.

I have a very good knowledge regarding the niche, which makes writing easy and enjoyable. This makes coming up with content ideas and finding gaps within the competitors sites an easy task.

Now, I just finished writing about one of my main topics and the final production is 10k words with a bunch of images and embeds!

I'm a bit hesitant about how to post it?I s it better to make it a single page (skyscraper) or to split it into 3 smaller articles and interlink them properly?!

The question isn't for just for 1 page or article. Actually I can come up with long articles for many of the topics to cover (hundreds of topics with thousands of words for each of them). This question is to determine the best structure for the whole site.

Some points to consider;
  • The article is informational, covering 1 main topic (keyword with a high difficulty in a competitive niche) and 5 more related keywords of medium difficulty.
  • I'm using long tails, kw variations and some q&a within the article. Most of those are medium to low difficulty.
  • The topic is broad enough that I can even add more and more relevant content to it.
  • Publishing as a whole
  • Looking at the ranking sites for main keyword, they're mixed between long form and shorter ones (avg word count for results on page 1 is 3k).
  • The results for the rest of kw's of lower difficulty are mostly 1k to 2k words.
That'd be the same for another few hundred keywords to cover later, I'm not sure about which would be a better way around for the long run; a site with 1000's of 2-3k word articles, or a site with 100's of 7-10k articles?

I Know it's not exact science, just looking for the opinions of the more experienced than me bloggers..
 
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I'm going to suggest you to try both. Skyscraper content always ranks better in my experience but you can also try multiple 1000-1500 words articles with internal linking.
 
"informational and covering a broad topic "

Really long article, with links to listicles. Create those listicles first.
 
Borderless Hustle said:
I'm going to suggest you to try both. Skyscraper content always ranks better in my experience but you can also try multiple 1000-1500 words articles with internal linking.
Click to expand...
I'm going to experiment things later for sure but rnw I'm thinking about the site structure as a whole.

Let's make an example;

If I'm building a website about dogs and I have thousands of dogs to sell, I'll be covering various breeds and also covering the traits of each dog that I'm selling.

Many approaches to pick from;
  1. A page with all the breeds and dogs (Negative since it would be such a huge mess and would provide bad user experience)
  2. A page with all the breads(skyscraper, completely informational) with each breed linking to another page with all the dogs I've of that breed.
  3. A seperate page for each breed and all the related dogs.
  4. A seperate page for each breed and a seperate page for each dog (harder to maintain, better for buying intent?)
The second one is my favorite since it would make room for more long form articles while keeping it organized, providing good UX and will limit the total number of pages I've so it becomes easier to maintain. But talking SEO, would that be the best thing to do?

biz said:
"informational and covering a broad topic "

Really long article, with links to listicles. Create those listicles first.
Click to expand...

For me, this is a natural thing to do and already in mind since the content allows much of those. Following the dogs examples I'd do a series of '10 best x breed dogs ever', another series of 'best breeds for x reason', etc..

I was planning those for later to play the rule of supporting pages, some clickbaiting, suitable for social media sharing, and also building more relevancy for the whole site.

But I'm still confused about the optimum site structure to start with..
 
Mohammed Saleh said:
which form of articles tend to rank better?
Click to expand...
depends on the niche and keywords. For question-type of keywords short articles are obviously better. For tutorial / guide type of keywords longer content is better

Mohammed Saleh said:
the final production is 10k words with a bunch of images and embeds!
Click to expand...
it's too long, man! I remember a few months ago that I desperately needed to know how to do something (I don't remember what, though) and I googled that thing and found a 8,000 words long article and about 3/5 into the article I got bored and clicked back. I don't remember whether I got the info I needed, from the first part of the article (I may have gotten it, though, which is probably why I closed that article), but it was still too long. At some point I remember having yawned lol.

Obviously that not everyone is like me, and some people do read all that stuff, but I feel like it's too much. Personally, I wouldn't create more than 5-6k words long articles for anything. If you need more than 5,000 words to cover a topic then probably the topic needs to be broken down anyway.

Mohammed Saleh said:
I'm a bit hesitant about how to post it?I s it better to make it a single page (skyscraper) or to split it into 3 smaller articles and interlink them properly?!
Click to expand...
I'd go with option 2. I mean, if the skyscraper is 4,000-6,000 words long you can do it. But if it's way more than 6k words just split it into a manageable size. Just my 2 cents
 
In my opinion, any article that is over 3000 words, will have a poor user experience; i myself would not even try to read an never-ending article; also you said you got embeds and images, think about the loading time of that article.

My 2c: Many smaller articles are much better than a really big one.
 
nSnoopy said:
In my opinion, any article that is over 3000 words, will have a poor user experience; i myself would not even try to read an never-ending article; also you said you got embeds and images, think about the loading time of that article.

My 2c: Many smaller articles are much better than a really big one.
Click to expand...

There are people who read through them and spend time with them, and share those articles.

You still can have small articles or listicles supporting the main article.
 
Mohammed Saleh said:
I found an area within this niche with too many (thousands) low difficulty keywords with 500+ search volume, hundreds of medium difficulty keywords with 10k+ search volume.
Click to expand...
For 0 comp or very low comp, you can get away with tiny articles, even 300 words and they rank.

For medium comp you need to apply the rule: write significantly longer articles than the ones you want to outrank.
 
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tazarbm said:
I remember a few months ago that I desperately needed to know how to do something (I don't remember what, though) and I googled that thing and found a 8,000 words long article and about 3/5 into the article I got bored and clicked back.
Click to expand...
Ofc I'm not going to ditch 10k words as a single block. Using bullet points, content table at head, anchor links pointing to key points on page to make the scrolling through easier, this won't make the user that lost/too bored.

tazarbm said:
I wouldn't create more than 5-6k words long articles for anything. If you need more than 5,000 words to cover a topic then probably the topic needs to be broken down anyway.
Click to expand...
Noted!

praetserge said:
Do you think I will read your 7k-10k word articles?
If I want to read a novel, I buy a book.

My best ranking articles are 800-2000 word long.
Click to expand...
You realize that most people read stuff online now and hardcopies sales are going down, right?

Anyway, my targeted audience tend to be good readers and would appreciate getting as much info as they could.

nSnoopy said:
In my opinion, any article that is over 3000 words, will have a poor user experience; i myself would not even try to read an never-ending article; also you said you got embeds and images, think about the loading time of that article.

My 2c: Many smaller articles are much better than a really big one.
Click to expand...
Not that much of images, I also compress them for better loading time.

Thanks for the advice!

blogmen said:
For 0 comp or very low comp, you can get away with tiny articles, even 300 words and they rank.

For medium comp you need to apply the rule: write significantly longer articles than the ones you want to outrank.
Click to expand...
Noted and Thanks for the insight, but once again I'm thinking the site structure as a whole not for each single keyword.

I'm aiming for an authority site in a competitive niche, I prefer the style to be consistent across most of my pages.

Also, main monetization would be display ads to start with and some other method that'd be only related to the quality of content and the amount of traffic that I get.
Not going to rely on affiliate or direct sales (at least until the site is stable and ranking maybe I'll think of utilizing some aff offers or promote products)
 
Mohammed Saleh said:
You realize that most people read stuff online now and hardcopies sales are going down, right?
Click to expand...
First of all, you know that book doesn't mean a hardcopy... right?
Secondly, why ask if you know the answer?
Both are rhetorical questions.
 
I would suggest randomizing. I personally use a 1:3 ratio (3 short articles and 1 long in-between). All long-form articles does seem like you are trying to hard to rank, might be a trigger for Google's AI Bots.

As you said it yourself, it's not exact science.
 
Dunga said:
I would suggest randomizing. I personally use a 1:3 ratio (3 short articles and 1 long in-between). All long-form articles does seem like you are trying to hard to rank, might be a trigger for Google's AI Bots.

As you said it yourself, it's not exact science.
Click to expand...

Do you mean creating a lot of articles for the same topic? How is that different from a main article and many short articles linking to that?
 
HustleTong said:
I'd cap the word count per post at 2-3K and interlink them
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I'll keep it just a bit above the highest word count in search results' first page and split the rest. Seems that's the most reasonable thing.
Dunga said:
I would suggest randomizing. I personally use a 1:3 ratio (3 short articles and 1 long in-between). All long-form articles does seem like you are trying to hard to rank, might be a trigger for Google's AI Bots.

As you said it yourself, it's not exact science.
Click to expand...
Trigger for what? I'd be penalized for long well researched and well written unique content that covers all the aspects for a given topic? I don't think..

praetserge said:
First of all, you know that book doesn't mean a hardcopy... right?
Secondly, why ask if you know the answer?
Both are rhetorical questions.
Click to expand...
I use a computer to do nearly everything but never to read a novel or anything longer than 50 pages.
Can we stop those questions now?!
 
It's very easy to develop some sort of "magical thinking" when it comes to long-form content.

After all, there are lots of articles saying that the longer your content, the higher the chance that you will rank.

But here's the cold, hard truth: correlation does not equal causation.

The reason why longer pieces of content tend to rank higher has less to do with the length and more to do with the value contained in that content.

Usually, if you really care about the experience of the people finding your pages when they do searches on Google, you're going to pack as much information there as possible.

You're going to try to walk them through the decision-making process or give them as much information so they can make an informed decision or add value to their lives.

Your focus is on them, and this usually means longer content.

But just because you have longer content doesn't automatically mean your rankings will go up.

I hope you know the difference.

Focus on the searcher.

Focus on the experience they walk away with, and you won't have to worry about keyword density or content length and all that good stuff.
 
Which one ranks better: long-form or short-form articles?

Experience-wise, it's the long-form articles that help me rank for lots of keywords. The longer the article (that makes sense), the more related keywords you'll be able to naturally use. It's also what I see in my Google Search Console account.

My clients in my content writing service confirms that. In what way? Nearly 90 percent of my clients now order articles with a minimum word count of 1,000. Unlike in the early 2010s, 150-word BuildMyRank (BMR) articles were still a thing.
 
The truth is that from the UX perspective a longer article feels bad

The reality is that by the time user has realized the article is too long for his taste, Google would have already cataloged him into a non-bounceback visit, which is positive froma ranking perspective.

And from a thoroughness of a topic and SEO purposes a longer article, generally ranks better because longer articles tend to target a wider spectrum of long-tail keywords.

Personally I'm a great fan of longer articles or skycrapper articles.

The issue: from the motivation perspective, they are extremely harsh. Many of my article writers and even myself, have forfeited multiple projects because they felt really tedious becuase of the neverending writtings.

Presonally I feel much more motivating to write 500 page 1K words articles than 50 page 10K words articles. A 50 page site feels tiny, while a 500 page page feels big, despite both have the same amount of content.

In fact is kind of weird that some of my writers, write faster 10 1K articles than 1 5K article

So each option has some pros and cons. Nowadays I prefer to use the write and merge technique: Write 1K words 500 pages articles, and the ones that don't receive almost any visit, remove the page, do a 301 to another page, and merge the content with that page.
 
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