By their nature, trends come and go and are rarely permanent. For freelancers, there’s one trend currently in play that may be here to stay: the trend towards longer-form, higher-quality content.
This is content that starts at approximately 1,200 words and can range to as many as 10,000 words. It is, polished, nuanced, creative and likely to stick around because it can offer some great benefits to brands, consumers, and freelance writers.
Brand benefit: Better SEO, more leadership positioning
The first benefit of longer content for brands is fairly straightforward: more length allows for more space to include keywords that give content a higher search engine ranking. Ideally, that translates to a higher number of eyeballs and elevated attention for a product or service.
What kind of keyword frequency increase are we talking about?
Depending on how it is written, a smaller article may have a handful of keywords while something longer can include a keyword as much as 15 to 20 times.
The second benefit of longer content is that it allows brands to place themselves in a leadership position within their industry. The added length allows them to highlight their expertise as they present their knowledge on a subject in detail.
Audience benefit: More information on a given topic
One of the biggest benefits to longer-form content is the opportunity to provide an increased amount of information on any given topic to audiences.
With added pages for an article, writers can include an additional story or statistic that they wouldn’t have had the room to place in a shorter-form piece. This allows the audience to gain more knowledge and to more deeply understand the nuances of an issue.
Writer benefit: Deeper storytelling
For freelance writers, a longer requirement for content is like a deeper sandbox where they have the chance to use a range of “toys” to help audiences understand something in a new way.
They can play around with descriptions and examples, use creative metaphors to make a point, and experiment with word choice a bit.
They can also weave in quotes and information from experts that contribute to a fuller development of their story.
