How to Create Long Form Content in WordPress?

Content is the master of any website. When it comes to driving audience (engagement) to any website, content plays a vital role in this regard. Since there is a lot of competition around, to stand out from the rest, your content of the website should be in-depth and of good quality that is capable enough to attract audiences.

Content can either be short formed or long formed.

Short & Long Formed Content

As the name indicates, short formed content comprises fewer words usually less than 1000. On the other hand, long form content is more than 1000 words. They give more details about a certain topic and cater to an audience that is not in a rush.

Short form article is typically quick and easy to digest content that covers a specific area of a topic, rather than going too in-depth or detailed. It is relatively easy to create and will not let your audience feel heavy after reading it.

Averse to this long form content is the type of content that truly engages audiences due to the depth of the topic that it covers. It is aimed at educating and informing those looking to answer a specific question or learn more about a topic. This type of content is resource-intensive and is usually not quick to produce and often requires a significant investment of time and resources. With all this in mind still opting long formed content instead of the short ones does wonder to your website.

Why Go For Long Formed Content?!

Even though looking at a lengthy article can be a turn-off for many, it does not mean focusing just on short formed content. Content creators are now preferring long well defined articles termed as long form instead of short ones and their reasons are valid.

Let me highlight the importance of long formed content to give you an idea of what wonders it can do to your website.

• It enhances the user’s experience and increases the time a user spent on a website.
• Content with words more than 1500 ranks well on search engines.
• Long formed content is more shareable and gives a boost to your traffic.
• By creating easy to navigate long formed content, the users can locate the required information easily skipping the part they don’t want any information on.
• These in-depth articles are a way through which all the details about a certain topic are easily available under just one link and people will not have to spend their time and energy searching for the right information in bits and pieces.
• The in-depth research compiled in a long form article helps in creating high quality posts and will help gather a loyal following. People will treat you as a professional in that particular topic which will have fruitful outcomes.
• As long formed articles are truly helpful and cover every aspect of a topic, are likely to get more back-links from authority sites, resulting in an increase in page authority.

Now that you know the importance of long formed content, in this article, I have penned down some tips and tricks that will help you along in creating such valuable content.

Happy Reading!

1 Use a Popular Keyword as Your Topic

Content is not for the one who writes, so the content creators should keep in their mind their reader’s interest while selecting a topic to write on. Remember, your article should be a way to help people solve a problem or get a new concept to improve not just a piece of a story.

You can use various keyword research tools like Ahrefs Keyword explorer, Google Keyword Planner, GrowthBar, etc to check your topic’s popularity you want to work on. Having the knowledge of what topics in your field is trending at the moment will let more users hook to your content. Prepare a content calendar to avoid any delays with posting and sharing your content.

Once, you have selected a topic you need to start your research on that topic before preparing to compile the data. Choosing a particular niche relevant topic will help your article to come out as a great piece of content.

2 Create an Outline of the Article By Thinking Of the Format

The next thing after the selection of your article topic is to create a topic outline. Think of all the headings and subheadings you will be covering in your article. This will help with your research and will create compelling long form content. The best article is the one that has many headings and subheadings as segregation of content becomes easier.

After this, you need to think of a format for your content e.g you can go for a review, tutorial, comparison, etc based articles. Selection of the right format with easy to navigate techniques is the key to a successful long form article.

3 Make Your Content Exciting

Long articles tend to be boring for the readers, so to keep it exciting and attractive there should be some elements in it to not let go of the audience visiting that article.

Here’s what you can do to make your articles more interesting:

Easy to navigate

You must have seen that when you read a book or any long document, there is a table of contents at the start of it. This is done to bring ease to the readers. Similarly, with long formed content you need to provide its table of contents at the beginning, so to make going through the information easier.

Just by clicking on the topic in the table of contents, you can go to that part of the article without having to read the entire piece. There are certain plugins that help you with creating a table of contents in your article. Click here for the plugin.

Before placing the table of contents for easy navigation, write a paragraph containing a summary of what the article is about. Then in your article create as many headings and subheadings you like. This will make your article more understandable instead of those long paragraphs.

Make your Article Attractive

Anything without colors is deemed to be boring. Thus, make your article attractive by placing images and using graphical content. Reading through massive walls of text can be difficult, especially when browsing an article on a small device. Images enable you to introduce logical breaks in your content, while also providing value.

When placing an image in your article, keep in mind that it should be relevant to the text under which you are placing it. At times, trying to explain a point becomes difficult when put in words, so it is recommended to use graphics either in the shape of an image, video, GIFs, etc, explaining that particular point.

Proper use of graphical content can increase the reader’s engagement. However, you must keep in mind that you do not want to reduce your server performance by uploading too much content that is large in size. Thus, before uploading any visual in your article, optimize it to decrease page loading time. The longer your page loading time, the more people will click away without reading. Here are a few WordPress plugins such as Imagify, WP Smush, etc that will compress your image.

Use Proven Facts

A good well-written article is one that contains proven facts. Try to provide statistics and reports on the topics you cover. People look up to credible information. If you are just writing your opinion in an article it will not attract audiences. Every time you state something make sure you link to the original source of the research or study that you’re citing.

4 Regularly Update Your Content

It is always best to choose a topic for your article which has no expiry date and can stand the test of time. These articles are termed as Evergreen Articles. After publishing such articles, your job is not completed their maintenance continues.

Long-form articles have the advantage of staying evergreen. You need to check daily if the facts you have stated in your articles are still valid or not. Imagine a person reading your article and looking at a fact that was 10 years ago and now has completely changed. This has an overall negative impact on your website.

Thus, you need to check and edit long-form articles from time to time, maybe once or twice per year to stay up to date with the changes happening worldwide.

Do you know? Using WordPress Survey plugin, you can create customer feedback surveys and learn what your audience wants to see in your blog.

5 Proofread It Before You Publish It!

When it comes to writing, there can be innumerable grammatical or spelling mistakes that you don’t want your audience to point it. These English mistakes can ruin your reputation in the market. So, make it a habit that before publishing any content proofread it to avoid errors and mistakes.

Usually, the chances of more mistakes are higher in long formed content than short form. To help content writers not make any such mistakes, there are many tools that can be helpful.

Grammarly, is one such tool that is very popular among the masses. These days all the good writers have access to this tool and it has made their lives very easy. Grammarly is not just a grammar checker, it can check all of your spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes, and style mistakes. Other than that, it can also check plagiarism in your content to give a better content analysis.

6 Post Reading Time Plugins

Since time is an investment, before blindly jumping into content people like to know what sort of time commitment they’re looking at. Try to include a post reading time feature in your content. This can be done with the help of plugins. One such good plugin is Reading Time. This will differentiate your long form

7 Promote With Long Form Content

With writing more good quality long form articles people start to treat you like a professional. Once you have grabbed the user’s attention, then selling any product or service is not a problem for you. After you’ve given them valuable information on a topic, you may wish to offer your services to help create a solution to the question they originally approached you with. This is highly recommended to do with long form articles instead of short ones.

8 Create SEO Optimized Content

As I have mentioned above that long formed articles are preferred for better SEO, so for your content to reach a large number of people it should be SEO optimized. WordPress offers tools like the Yoast SEO Plugin, Rank Math, and the All-in-One SEO Plugin to enhance the SEO of your long form content.

Make sure not to spam keywords, i.e., do not flood the article with your target keyword where it’s not appropriate. Use a meta description that tells the audience exactly what they will achieve through this article.

9 Writing Tricks

Try to keep your words as simple as possible. Your sentences should be well structured and not extra long. Remember that those difficult dictionary words are not recommended as they will repel people who are reading your content to understand it instead of complicating things. As it is said that fluff is easy and main content is always hard.

There are certain writing tips and tricks if implemented in your long form content can give better results. These include:

• Use bullets points to throw more light on a particular topic.
• Use short paragraphs instead of long ones.
• Write in such a way that after stating a problem you give an immediate solution to it.
• Try not to be very formal in your writing.
• Document your article such that the reader finds it not conventional.

By following these guidelines you can create the best long form content that will glue people to your site.

10 Social Media Marketing

Creating long form content requires a lot of effort and time. Before even publishing your content, start advertising it on social media platforms. This you should do when your article is ready or it’s properly planned. All you need to do is to create the hype before publishing the main content.

This will surely increase the number of people visiting it. There are certain ways you can do that. Like you can upload an image having some useful tips about your article in it or you can just write a small post about the content of your article. This will keep your audience hooked to your website even before publishing the article.

Another thing that is usually taken for granted, but if considered will help your article rank well is giving credit to the one writing that content. At times various authors are hired as guest authors to write content on a website. This brings new energy to the website and the different writing style brings diversity.

Since readers are interested in knowing about the writer who penned down their favorite piece, it is recommended to give due credit to the writer by mentioning his name and a little description. Doing that is not taxing as you can use the most practical way of creating them by Simple Author Box plugin. This plugin creates responsive author boxes which are fully customizable.

Tools & Plugins To Aid You With Creating Long Form Content

Long form content can surely increase your website’s traffic for the reasons I mentioned above. So, creating such content needs some tools and plugins that will assist you in creating successful lengthy detailed content. I have briefly explained a few tools above too, but here I will give detail about them.

Evernote is one such tool downloading it will make your life easy. With it you can deal with any project, your notes, tasks, and schedule all in one place hassle free. It syncs all of your information across your different devices, which makes this platform an exceptional tool for your long form content.

You can use Evernote to save research for your articles, choose the right-hand option “To organize content.”

When it comes to gaining more traffic through more words as in the case of long form articles, it is misconstrued that words alone can do that job. You need to take extra measures to optimize your content for SEO.

Yoast SEO plugin is one such tool that pulls organic traffic towards your website. It is the most popular plugin when it comes to WordPress optimization. Don’t forget to install it before publishing your long formed content.

As I mentioned above that to make your content attractive you need to place good quality images or any visual to do the job. Again you don’t need to slow down your website, so use image compression plugins for WordPress. Imagify, WP Smush, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, and Optimus Image Optimizer are highly recommended for this task.

After you install these plugins, they will automatically optimize your uploaded images without impacting your WordPress site’s performance.

If you want your content to stand out from the rest then you also need to focus on your site’s theme. No doubt you can use any theme, but there are a few themes designed especially just for writing long form content.

Typable, is a writer-ready theme that lets your words speak. Typable is ideal for businesses that want to add long form articles to their content strategy. This theme is easy to customize and has a great navigation menu for long form articles.

Wrapping Things Up!

No doubt writing long form content takes a lot of time but it is totally worth the investment. This type of content lets your website stand out from the lot. I have tried to highlight all the ways through which you can create good quality long form content. Let me give a recap of what you will find in this piece.

1. Find a trending topic and the right format for your article.
2. Make your article interesting by easy navigation, using attractive visuals, and proven facts.
3. Aim for evergreen articles that you can update regularly.
4. Proofread your content to avoid mistakes.
5. Focus on creating SEO optimized content.
6. Make your long form article rank well by various writing tricks.
7. Use proper structure for your articles including headings, subheadings, etc.
8. Use various long form creating plugins to assist you in the job.

I hope that by following these steps you will be able to create lengthy detailed articles without any difficulty. By keeping these tips in mind, you will be able to see great positive results. Whenever you focus on providing value to the audience, the outcome is fruitful.

With more long form content your readers will spend more time on the site, user engagement will go up, you’ll become an authority, and your site’s SEO will improve. When your goal is set right then you don’t have to be afraid of putting in the time and energy required. So, what are you waiting for? Get up and start your work. 👍

If you have any queries or feedback, reach out and post in the comments section below.