Should I split long form content?
-
I have quite a long content on my site. By length I mean around 8000-9000 words. I optimized it to cover almost all searches related to a topic.
But this length makes me uneasy for some reason. I do not think that users will find what they are looking for in such a long content. However, I don't want to neglect the SEO aspect of the content.
I can talk about something like this without sharing the keywords completely:
- Title + for girls
- Title + for boys
- Title + for kids
- Title + for girlfriend
- Title + for boyfriend
- Title + for students
As I said, in the current situation, these are all sub-headings (H2) of 8000-9000-word content. When I make a separate content for each of them, I can bring them all closer to 1500-2000 words.
However, I am undecided whether this is the right step in terms of SEO and content optimization. What are your views?
-
At 8K-9K words I do think there is merit to split up your content into smaller articles with more focus some of the sub topics
-
@mozasea said in Should I split long form content?:
I have quite a long content on my site. By length I mean around 8000-9000 words. I optimized it to cover almost all searches related to a topic.
But this length makes me uneasy for some reason. I do not think that users will find what they are looking for in such a long content. However, I don't want to neglect the SEO aspect of the content.
I can talk about something like this without sharing the keywords completely:
- Title + for girls
- Title + for boys
- Title + for kids
- Title + for girlfriend
- Title + for boyfriend
- Title + for students
As I said, in the current situation, these are all sub-headings (H2) of 8000-9000-word content. When I make a separate content for each of them, I can bring them all closer to 1500-2000 words.
However, I am undecided whether this is the right step in terms of SEO and content optimization. What are your views?
I think you're talking about pillar content. What you can do is leave that long -form content as it is, adjust it to rank for a specific keyword, and support it with 7-8 short-form articles.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Write new articles or republish old ones?
Hi,
Content Development | | Enrico_Cassinelli
we run a tourism information website about a region in italy, and each year, during special occasions such as christmas, easter and so on we publish an article with a "what to do on Christmas / Easter / .... in the Langhe" (collecting events, activities, etc.). Is it better to "reuse" the old articles and change only the year in the title and of course the content (providing that we are gonna keep the URL without year), or to publish a new one? thanks!0 -
To hyphenate or not to hyphenate?
Quick question: does Google differentiate between terms that correctly include a hyphen (such as "royalty-free") and those that are incorrect ("royalty free")? I ask because the correct term "royalty-free"(with a hyphen) receives far less monthly traffic for the same term without the hyphen (according to Moz): Term | Estimated traffic
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
"royalty free music" | 11.5-30.3K
"royalty-free music" | 501-850 If Moz views the terms separately then I'd guess that Google does too, in which case the best thing to do for SEO (and increased site traffic) would be to wrongly use "royalty free" without the hyphen. Is that correct?0 -
Is it a good idea to publish a list of players in my industry, including competitors?
I am working with an e-commerce site that does mostly B2B sales in a very commoditized industrial product segment in which very few manufacturers sell direct. It's all done through distributors and resellers, like our site. We don't often win on price, but we do win enough SERP battles to get the visitors and provide great customer service, so we have gained a following and we do compete well for some very large orders. We list several thousand products and in a given month, visitors regularly hit over 1,000 different landing pages. While we make most money from relatively few items, most items are sold only once a year, maybe twice. It's a very longtail business, and therefore tough to do a great job optimizing all pages down the tail. So, one thing I'm doing is building out a set of resource pages with common questions, terminology and other useful bits so the site gains more traffic and authority, in the hope of boosting product pages. e.g., an in-depth category definition in the glossary could link to all the items in a category. In addition to adding content that augments product pages, I'd like to create basically a map of the whole industry, including brand name manufacturers, white label manufacturers, distributors, etc. If it's going to be a truly comprehensive list, it should include my competitors. Given that I have never found such a list, it feels like this could be a good page and earn some links. Since it's unlikely much traffic will even find that page, compared to product pages, are there potential pitfalls I should be aware of? I get the feeling if I create a page that others bookmark and visit when hunting for products in our market, we win, even if most visitors to that page won't buy from us. I've been in this industry for four years now, and it's amazing how hard it is to find some companies. Only a handful even think about SEO, since they sell through other channels. Should I link to all my competitors (which is only about a dozen) among hundreds of other industry links?
Content Development | | Mike_Sobol0 -
Is this site speed improvement legit?
A client of ours has used a 3rd party company who charged them $300 to "speed up" their website. He is wondering if this is legitimate? In a very short period (one day), the site speed has improved from about 20 to 86 on desktop and 100 on mobile. This is on a Shopify site. As far as I can see from looking at the back end of the site, all that has been done is that a new theme has been uploaded. Nothing else has been done, eg all images look to be the same size, etc. When I asked how the work had been done so quickly, I was told "It was done by a highly professional team of Shopify web designers and developers." Has anyone come across this type of speed optimisation and can you tell me anything about it?
SEO Tactics | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Odd one - dropping positions but traffic improving
Seem to have a bit of an odd one. For the last few months been running a backlink campaign for a 2/3 year old site, got good positions for some keywords/pages but seems to have plateaued the last 60 days or so with some keywords dropping in position.
Link Building | | seoman10
The odd thing is traffic seems to be still improving (according to GA and GSC). I am wondering if - have hit a niche ceiling
or rankbrain type thing i.e. google trying to work out what the site should be ranking for and messing with positions.
or because it is just a newish site. Any ideas?2 -
Can't get Google to index our site although all seems very good
Hi there, I am having issues getting our new site, https://vintners.co indexed by Google although it seems all technical and content requirements are well in place for it. In the past, I had way poorer websites running with very bad setups and performance indexed faster. What's concerning me, among others, is that the crawler of Google comes from time to time when looking on Google Search Console but does not seem to make progress or to even follow any link and the evolution does not seem to do what google says in GSC help. For instance, our sitemap.xml was submitted, for a few days, it seemed like it had an impact as many pages were then visible in the coverage report, showing them as "detected but not yet indexed" and now, they disappeared from the coverage report, it's like if it was not detected any more. Anybody has any advice to speed up or accelerate the indexing of a new website like ours? It's been launched since now almost two months and I was expected, at least on some core keywords, to quickly get indexed.
Technical SEO | | rolandvintners1 -
blog url structure change affect on pagerank
We are looking to change our blog structure which will help us with the organization of the topics but the url structure will change if we do this. Right now all of the blogs are under a general news blog, which we will be breaking out articles into several blog category topics Current:
Technical SEO | | theblueprints
example of current structure
current site: https://domain/blogs/news/blog article name Proposed Change:
current site: https://domain/blogs/keyword-name-of-blog-category/blog article name We have ranked #1 for several keywords that we would like to preserve the ranking if we make this switch with 301 redirects. Looking for suggestion on the percentage of chance our ranking will be negatively affected and by how much? Also what everyones recommendation is if we should make this switch or not touch the urls. Your help is appreciated, thanks in advance.0