Content Writing: Long Form or Short Form?

Content Strategy: what are the differences between both styles?

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Don’t let the image fool you. It’s not about handwriting. It’s about style. The kind you use to create web content.

When it comes to writing for the web, whether on a blog, a company website, social media, emails, or infographics, there’s a general rule of thumb to apply in how many words each post should contain.

Short-form: quick-to-the-point on one topic

With short form, it's generally defined as 1,000–1,200 words though some would say that 500–800 is standard for short form. It depends on which *experts* you want to listen to. I get my ideas on this topic from Semrush since I use them for my content marketing strategy.

Regardless of whom you refer to for ideas, the main idea is that this style of information delivery is designed to get a message across quickly and effectively. It’s information that shares one main idea with the reader who can consume it in a relatively short amount of time, maybe 3–5 minutes read time. I use Yoast with WordPress because of the built-in feature that shows me how many minutes it takes to read.

Long-form: A longer read with organized sub-heading topics

Whereas long-form content is anything well over 1,200 words. Sometimes up to 2,000 words but in certain instances, such as case studies, it can go up to 5,000 words.

Long-form posts are used when the writer wants to go in-depth on a specific topic. This can be evergreen, cornerstone web pages, or pillar pages.

Guides, e-books, and whitepapers also require long-form content writing. The length and amount of words in these content types speak to the expertise of the writer on the topic. However, be careful you don’t just string words together just to appear as an expert. The quality of the shared knowledge and how it is organized is crucial to the reader wanting to learn more about a specific topic.

So the next time you want to write an “Ultimate Guide to…” don’t just fill it with fluff but really share useful and valuable information with your readers.

Choose the right format for the purpose of your message

The length of your content depends upon the type of message you want to send. Both methods are valuable to search intent. That is, what users are looking for on Google. And both types of content help build traffic to your site in different ways, something you’ll measure as time goes on to determine which performs better for the task.