Long copy/articles vs short copy/articles

[Mattcarter08]

Hi i'm after data which shows having long articles (e.g. 3000 words) outperforms a much shorter article like 1000 words (assume they are both the same quality of articles) for SEO and even conversion.

So far i have seen these articles.

http://moz.com/blog/why-content-goes-viral-the-scientific-theory-and-proof including the PDF which links to it.

http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012

Can anyone recommend any other sources which backs the claim that long articles are normally better than short articles.

Cheers,

Matt

[Chris.Menke]

In answer to your specific question, according to SerpIQ, The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2000 words. And the higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page contains--until you reach about 2500 words.

[EGOL]

Nice link, Chris.  Thanks!

I have found from personal experience that long articles pull in a LOT more long-tail traffic.

I have lots of pages on my site that had 50 words several years ago and I have slowly be rewriting them into 1000 to 3000 word articles with lots of photos.  As I do this the traffic skyrockets, not only from increase longtail but also by higher rankings.