Just one month ago, I carried out a critical test on my content and discovered that majority of my visitors were neither scrolling nor reading the copy on seophoenix.com.
As a result of this shocking discovery, I carried out an A/B test on my homepage which features 1,300 words. The current homepage’s form fields are quite below the fold, and based on this I concluded the reason for the poor conversion rate could be the design.
So, I went ahead to create a new design for the homepage and featured only 500 words. I also ensured that the form fields are placed higher on the page.
Your guess about which of the designs yielded a better conversion rate is as good as mine. The previous design’s conversion rate became 8 percent better compared to the new design. That’s not all. In terms of lead, the quality from the long form design of seophoenix.com came out better. Simply put, these leads were more qualified compared to the leads generated from the recent design.
I guess you are seriously surprised at this outcome, aren’t you? Well, my profound examination revealed that most of the times, long form copy boosts ranking as well as conversions.
Indeed, Content is King…
For any webpage you notice appearing on Google’s top 10 results for any keyword, such webpage would usually have nothing less than 2,000 words. You will notice that the higher the position of a link featured on search engine result page, the more word counts such page contains. This is an indication that the search engines, and Google being the king prefers content-rich web pages. But most importantly, the preference that Google gives to a webpage with more content is not just a random thing, but because data already revealed that a good number of readers prefer it so.
Here’s another essential point:
Content-rich web pages generate more links…
A lot of people perceive that content is extremely valuable and as a result would want to link to content-rich webpages more than they link to web pages with short content. About two years ago, precisely 2012, seophoenix.com carried out an analysis on their blog content to see if any relationship exists between the length of a content and backlinks.
The result of this analysis showed a direct correlation between the number of words a content has and the amount of links it generates. Contents with more word counts generated the most links. And, it is a well-known fact that the more links a website generates, the better its ranking on search engines. This explains why an average website featured on Google’s first result page will usually have more than 2,000 word count.
Even the social channels prefer in-depth content web pages…
Not too long, I carried out yet another analysis on the impact of content-rich webpages. Here’s what I did; I extracted the 350 blog posts that I submitted on Quick Sprout and grouped them into two. The first group featured blog posts with less than 1,500 words, while the second group featured posts with 1,500 word-count and above. Subsequently, I tested each group to determine the number of Tweets and Facebook Likes each post generated.
Here’s the result: blog posts with less than 1,500 words generated approximately 175 tweets and 59 Facebook likes on the average. On the other hand, posts with more than 1,500 words count got approximately 294 Tweets and 73 Facebook likes on the average.
Learn more on seophoenix.com.