When to write long content on a general informational keyword: Ecommerce

[BobGW]

Hello,

Say you sell barbecue grills. When would it be appropriate to write a "Complete guide to Barbecuing" that offers everything: background, recipes, statistics, products, etc? The barbecue niche actually is better suited for a complete guide than my client's niche.

My client doesn't sell barbecue grills but he is in a niche that doesn't have hardly any traffic to specific information.

He's thinking of writing an article about the most general keyword directly in his niche, "A Complete Guide to X". Right now his Ecommerce home page is on page 17 for this keyword, it's competitive, and last year G Analytics showed 700 page views while on page 17. It would cover a lot more information than the barbecue example with heavy authority as competition.

The article would be about 4000 words. There's nothing that complete out there but, again, there's a few very authoritative sources to compete against that we'd never outrank. We'd try to make it best-of-the-web.

We're looking to get natural backlinks. We might do outreach but a more specific guide might work better for outreach, which we're also writing.

Should he do this as one of his 5 articles for the site?

[TakeshiYoung]

Given people's short attention spans, I would recommend breaking the article up into a series of smaller articles such as recipes, models, cleaning, etc. That will improve the relevance of each of the articles for those keywords as well, and give you multiple pieces of content to promote via social media and other channels.

Then create a main "hub" page (the "Complete Guide") that links out to each of these articles, as well as to your actual product page. Drive links to both the content hub and to the individual articles.

[ProjectLabs]

I like this approach and it is something we have tried recently with the goal of being the best page available on the Internet.

There is also data that suggests longer pages tend to rank better, although it isn't clear to me if this is causation or correlation.

I recommend the article "How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions" if you haven't seen it on Quicksprout. There may be some good data that you can show your client to support why you should create the long guide.

[EGOL]

Then create a main "hub" page (the "Complete Guide") that links out to each of these articles, as well as to your actual product page.

This is a very good idea.

It is actually like the category pages on an information site.  These can be very competitive because they are optimized for the difficult term, they often have lots of content, and they link to much deeper content elsewhere on the same site - and those pages link back.