Neil Patel – a founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics companies and one of the leading western analysts. About a month ago Neil noticed, that majority of the visitors who come to his site NeilPatel.com, do not scroll down the page and therefore do not read it. This can have a direct negative impact on conversion, since an application form is placed under the text at the bottom of the page (approximately the fifth window when you scroll down). To find out whether it is true, he decided to perform A/B test on the homepage. The initial text size was 1292 words, and as it was noted, the application form was below the text. Alternative version of the homepage contained 488 words and application form was placed nearer to the top (approximately the second scrolled window).
The results Neil received were quite surprising. The first version of the page gave 7.6% more conversion, than its shortened variant. Furthermore, the lead quality sent by the first version was by far better.
Hence, a natural question arises “Whether a page with a large amount of content works better than a page with less text?
Content rocks
SEM Group company has analyzed top 10 search results for over 20 thousands search queries and found out an interesting relationship. The average text length of the page which is in top 10 Google search results is at least 2000 words. The higher ranking is, the more content a page contains. For example, a page in the first place of the search results on average has about 2416 words, a page that occupies the tenth place – 2032 words.
It is interesting, that Google prefers sites with a lot of content not because they are of a great value, but because users like them more. The next study proves this point.
More content, more links
Users are more likely to share long posts. This conclusion was drawn by SEOmoz specialists who have analyzed posts of their own blog:
Based on these data it is easy to reveal a direct correlation between the links number and content length. And the more quality links a page has, the better it is being ranked.
Social media opts for content
The next survey Neil did was about the posts on his blog. All content he divided in two groups – posts with less than 1500 words and those that above 1500. Then he analyzed the number of tweets and Facebook-likes each post earned.
Post with less than 1500 words got an average of 174,6 tweets and 59,3 likes, while posts larger than 1500 words received around 293,5 tweets and 72,7 Facebook-likes, which is 68,1% and 22,6% more respectively.
Larger content gets higher conversion
As we mentioned earlier, page NeilPatel.com had better conversion when it had more text, even with application form placed below it. Crazy Egg page study showed similar results – a version with larger content converted 30% better than its shortened variant.
Marketing Experiments company carried out the same kind of tests for contextual ad. They measured CTR of ads with long and short text. As a result, long texts were displayed 40-45% more often generating positive ROI of 50%.
The final note
We have come to conclusions, that text length is no less important than its meaning. It doesn’t matter for what type of pages you write the content – online shop or your own blog –if you want to get more traffic and higher conversion, you should create large texts.
But before you start, think of the following:
- You should create really good content.
- More doesn’t always mean better. There are some pages for which short texts work better. To find out what variant is good for your web source, perform tests.
- Keep it reasonable. You should not try to make a 2000-word text from a good piece of content with 500 words. This can only make things worse.
- Remember about social networks users. Your texts should be readable for them.
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