It’s no secret that readers’ attention spans have gotten shorter over the years. But you’ve probably also heard the advice that long-form content ranks higher in search engines.
So what should you do?
The Goal of Content Marketing
Let’s pull back and think about the ultimate goal: The purpose of your blog is to build authority to drive traffic so you can get more customers.
If the goal is getting more customers, then you need content that is:
1- Findable
2- Relevant
3- Usable
4- Directly tied to you as the solution to the person’s problem
If all those things are true, then it’s easy to see that long blog posts don’t meet those criteria. But you still need to demonstrate your depth of knowledge.
Why Use Content Clusters?
Which brings us to this idea: What if instead of going long (ie: lengthy posts), you go deep (by clustering shorter posts together)?
This idea has several advantages including:
1- You don’t have to slave over War & Peace length articles
2- You have the flexibility to swap out ideas as things change, without rewriting entire articles
3- You can bring in new ideas that are more relevant as your business grows
And the best part is search engines don’t penalize you for having shorter posts.
Google cares about high-quality content. So as long as you’re creating complete posts that match the searcher’s intent, you’re all set.