Long-Form Content Will Dominate Content Marketing in 2026

When it comes to getting backlinks, holding customer attention, and rising up the Google rankings, there’s no competition. Long-form content, any writing that measures over 2,000+ words, outperforms short-form content in every single way. 

What’s more, with the rise of SGE and AIO SEO, generative AI search tools are routinely pulling from long-form articles to formulate their overview. Long-form content, according to the SEMRush State of Content Marketing report, gets 2x the page views, 24% more shares, and almost 4x the traffic than short-form content. 

If that wasn’t convincing enough, it’s not just digital content marketing services that are making a sharp turn toward long-form content. In fact, as I’ll demonstrate in this article, we’re seeing a cultural renaissance of long-form content. From every single person in the world suddenly having a podcast to the rise of the YouTube video essay, long-form writing is everywhere.

So, in this article, we’ll finally answer the age-old question – does size really matter? 

What Is Long-Form Content?

Long-form content is digital writing that offers extensive coverage of a topic, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of its topic. While there is no fixed quantity that converts something from short-form to long-form, many consider anything over 2,000 words to be long-form content.

Long-form content tries to capture the reader’s attention for as long as possible while answering absolutely any questions or concerns they may have about a topic. 

What Are the Key Characteristics of Long-Form Content?

This might shock you, but long-form content is longer than short-form content. Jokes aside, there are several other central characteristics that define something as long-form.

Here are the main characteristics of long-form content:

• Depth: Long-form content allows content writers to create articles that go in-depth on every single thing they touch upon in the article. As there is no low word-count limit, writers are able to draw upon extensive research, breaking down tiny, but important distinctions and ensuring they pack in as many useful details as possible for the reader. Long-form writing offers a level of detail and depth that gives it a unique level of value to customers.

• Breadth: Alongside going into detail on each section that a writer discusses, long-form content also provides space to include a wide variety of information blocks. Taking a broad perspective and hitting all of the major content topics that relate to an article helps to create a supremely useful and educational resource for your audience. 

• Search Term Flexibility: Part of the magic of long-form content is that it gives freelance writers the space they need to strike that balance between depth and breadth. As a consequence of this, they can touch upon a larger selection of keywords, long-tails, and search term questions. Long-form articles outrank short-form content on search engines, partly because they’re able to offer search engines a more comprehensive overview of a topic, enhancing authority and proving the expertise on the page. 

While these pillars mainly pertain to written content, they are also similarly found in other forms of long-term media. For example, an interview with a B2B SaaS founder would similarly exhibit both breadth and depth – with the simple presence of these two characteristics drawing in a larger number of clicks and helping content to rank better overall.

Although not 1:1 across all long-form media styles, these pillars are a good general rule of thumb to look for. 

What Are the Benefits of Long-Form Content?

Long-form writing is engaging for readers, useful for SERPs looking for a topical authority, and expansive enough to capture AIO (AI Overviews). Simply put, when it comes to digital content, long-form ticks all the boxes.

Here are some of the main benefits of long-form content:

• Customer Retention: Long-form content keeps people reading for longer. While a simple rule, this practice has been applied everywhere from digital marketing to newspaper engagement to keep users interested for as long as possible. The important thing to note here is that your writing must be high-quality; it must deserve that extended engagement time. When you give your customers better long-form content, they’ll reward you by engaging for longer, coming to your website more frequently, and interacting regularly. 

• Enhanced Brand Authority: By nature, long-form content covers more nuance on a topic than a short-form article on the same area. Often, this means that your articles will rank for a wider range of long-tail keywords, as you’ve concisely tackled more topics in each article that could then appear in search results. When your customers search for a content area in your industry, if you have lots of long-form posts, you’ll be more likely to appear in the rankings, making your brand seem like a topical authority in your field. 

• Improved SEO Dominance: One of the reasons I’m writing this article is that SEO has begun to shift recently, accounting for the rising presence of SGE SEO. While I’ll expand upon this shortly, long-form content helps to generate more backlinks, provides more space for long-tail variants, and lends itself to featuring in AI overviews. Simply put, readers, search engines, and AI scraping tools are all looking for high-quality long-form content.

Backlinko recently published a study where they investigated the difference in backlink generation between short- and long-form content. Overwhelmingly, long-form outperformed in every category. Most importantly, for businesses that want to build their visibility and soar up the SERP rankings, long-form content generates significantly more backlinks than short-form posts.

Source: Long-form content generates more backlinks than short-form blog posts.

Examples of Long-Form Content: The Multi-Media Pivot

While I’ve primarily discussed long-form B2B articles and digital content, the mass movement to long-form media is far from solely confined to this space. Across industries and content format styles, long-form content is booming.

Alongside long-form articles and blogs, which we’ve already discussed, here are examples of long-form content across different media channels:

• YouTube Essays

• TikTok 10-Minute Videos

• Industry Reports

• Streaming

• eBooks

• Pillar Pages

• Case Studies

• Long-form Journalism

YouTube Videos: The Rise of the Video Essay

Over the past few years, what is considered long-form content on YouTube has changed significantly. A ten-minute video quickly became a twenty-minute one. Fast forward, and the YouTube video essay genre is in full bloom.

Below, you can see a video essay from Contrapoints, a political commentator and ex-academic, who exclusively posts videos that are hours long and certainly tick the breadth and depth categories.

Source: The Contrapoints YouTube Channel.

YouTube prefers their creators to favor long-form video content, as it:

• Provides more room for advertisements.

• Increases average watch time per user, boosting the total time users spend on the platform.

• Enhances the connection between users and creators, as the former spends more time engaging with the latter.

From a creator, advertiser, and consumer standpoint, long-form content is a win-win-win. 

TikTok

Since early 2022, TikTok has increased the total video time limit from three to 10 minutes. This 233% increase reflected the changing sentiment and strategy at the time. Years later, time has shown that TikTok made the right decision. 

The introduction of long-form video content represented the beginning of a new era, allowing creators to film and publish longer stories for their audience. This brought in a widely different strategy for engaging audiences, promising longer viewing times and increased engagement.

The movement toward long-form content by TikTok also allowed the platform to begin to compete with other video content solutions like YouTube – capturing an element of the long-form video market. 

Industry Reports

Industry reports, often published either annually or quarterly, take a sweeping look at the entire state of a field. These rely on surveys, interviews, internal and external data, and more to make a comprehensive report of what is going on and how the market is reacting.

There are a number of reasons that industry reports are effective long-form writing:

• Authority: Publishing a State of Report on a field demonstrates that you have extensive knowledge and data to share that the rest of your industry will find valuable. For example, this State of Freelance Writing Report offers a comprehensive overview of the field, revealing new data, insights, and trends for other industry experts to reference.

• Link Building: Industry reports are some of the best-performing digital content. If you’re looking for backlinks, then producing high-quality data and sharing it with your peers could be the way to go.

• Customer Updates: Some industry reports are framed toward the customer. They take stock of a company’s performance and create a concise report of how they’re doing. This form of report is often called an Impact Report, and is fantastic at improving conversion and enhancing customer retention. 

The Rise of Streaming

Twitch, Kick, and other streaming platforms have had incredible upward traction over the past few years. Research from Statista estimates that Twitch has reached an all-time peak of 6.4 million concurrent users. Streamers, people that go live on these platforms, typically do so for an average of 5-7 hours at a time. Of course, not everyone tunes in for this entire period, but the reliability of streamers being live at any moment throughout the day offers a continual form of long-form content.

While the vast majority of streaming content falls under the video game category, this isn’t the whole story. For example, several of the most famous streamers are actually political streaming channels. For example, Hasan Piker streams every day, reviewing political news and commentating for millions of viewers.

Streaming is an excellent example of the rise of long-form content, with users across the globe tuning in to these live videos for hours each day. 

eBooks

eBooks are another popular form of long-form content. Much like a long-form article or an industry report, an eBook will tackle a central topic or idea, but expand it out to cover every single related topic. 

The word eBook itself can vary immensely depending on what form of content a company wants to write. For example, some businesses produce eBook case studies that they send out to their customers. These could be around 10 pages of content that neatly explore a problem and how a company solved it.

Other businesses produce comprehensive 50+ page eBooks that become industry resources for other professionals. Whether your content is on this spectrum, it still falls under the long-form writing category. 

Source: An eBook I helped write for Revenera and their software composition analysis maturity model.

Pillar Pages

Pillar pages are a specific style of long-form content that aims to become the central hub for all topics related to a single term. A pillar page will have a broad overall scope – like ‘Digital Marketing’ – and then will try and briefly cover absolutely everything related to this topic. 

In SEO strategy, pillar pages are the central hub from which all writers can then build all the other pages in a wider content campaign. For example, our ‘digital marketing’ category will then use internal linking to a larger article on each of the H2s in the pillar page. 

Pillar pages are a blend of long-form content writing and SEO strategy, providing a central hub for reader information and search engine crawling. They are enormously useful in structuring digital websites and a key arrow in every digital marketer’s quiver. 

Case Studies

Case studies are long-form reports that take previous performance and surmise what occurred, what the outcome was, and why customers or future clients should be interested. For the majority of B2B companies, developing case studies is a central part of MOFU and BOFU strategy, as it allows customers to see exactly why your solution is a punch above the rest.

Creating case studies also gives your company a platform to show off its positive results. If new clients or customers are looking for hard data on how you can help, a case study fills that purpose perfectly. 

Long-Form Journalism

If you’re an avid reader of The New Yorker, then you’ll know where I’m going with this. Long-form journalism isn’t exactly new, but it’s experiencing a cultural renaissance with people actively looking for content that keeps them occupied and improves their reading stamina. 

Source: AI and Loneliness Aritcle from The New Yorker.

News websites like The New Yorker publish long-form journalism that can span upwards of 10,000 words. These give a comprehensive overview of a niche topic, going in depth and providing both explanation and expert commentary throughout. 

Often, this form of journalism pulls on a blend of personal anecdotes and hard data to create an emotive, compelling story.

How to Write Long-Form Content: Two Winning Strategies

The best long-form content writing strikes a balance between depth and breadth, giving your audience everything they want to know, but making sure you’re not overdoing it. That said, if it’s your first time writing longer content, I’d suggest using one of these two strategies and improving from there.

Here are two winning strategies to write long-form content with ease.

Cover a broad range of topics

When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to ensure you’ve come at a topic from every possible angle. After all, you don’t want a reader to come away with even more questions than they had to start with.

To get started with this, you should brainstorm what topics are likely to come up when someone searches for your main topic term. 

One way you can do this is by searching your topic in Google and then seeing what ‘People Also Ask.’ You can also use keyword research tools (Google Keyword Planner does this for free) if you want to see what other common search terms are often placed next to your main keywords.

Hit absolutely everything that a user wants to know. These questions exist because people are searching for them – if there’s a demand, you should try and fulfill it.

Go as deep as possible

If you have extensive knowledge on a topic, then sometimes the best thing you can do is share as much as possible. I’m talking nitty-gritty details, strategies you’ve developed over years of tinkering, and small tips that you think the world needs to know.

While it can seem strange to go so in-depth on these topics, I assure you that your knowledge is valuable. Someone out there, whether they’re just passionate about the same ideas or work in a similar field, will want to know what you think and will find your content useful.

When in doubt, remember that detail is key. Don’t skip steps, go in-depth on every part of a strategy, and make sure that anyone could come away from your content feeling a little bit better-versed on your topic. 

Of course, the best long-form content does both of these. So, if you have it in you and your keyboard is at the ready, give breath and depth a go in the same article. 

The Emergence of Long-Form Content in the Age of Search Generative Experience

Search generative experience and AI overviews have changed the game when it comes to search engine ranking. While getting to that top spot is still as valuable as ever, there’s now a secondary competition to make it into the AI summary – with a reference back to your page.

Here’s why AI SEO has led to the rapid emergence of long-form content as a winning content strategy. 

• SGE SEO Looks for Authority: When selecting resources to scrape and surmise for its summary, Google and other search engine AI overview tools look for content that has depth, touching on the nuances of a topic to give something useful to the audience. If you can provide in-depth content that breaks down everything someone needs to know about a topic, you’ve got authority covered.

• AI Overviews Need Breadth: If you take a look at any AIO, you’ll see that it normally hits several central areas at once. From its initial summary to benefits and even other small sections like recommendations, it packs a lot of content in. Long-form content articles do the same, with AIOs modelling their responses on the content in these longer-style posts. When looking for an article to pull from, if AI sees you’ve answered all the major questions a user may have when searching for a topic, you’re likely to be selected as a reference. 

• Thin Content Is Penalized By Google’s Helpful Content Update: One of the major shifts that we’ve seen in the digital content marketing space over the last five years is the arrival of Google’s Helpful Content. Helpful content sought to remove ‘thin’ content from the internet, getting rid of articles filled with fluff or those that added nothing to the conversation. Long-form content is an antidote to this, providing Google’s bots with well-researched, useful, and insightful content to rank. SGE pulls from top results, which – time and time again – are long-form content writing.

Whether you want to snap up the featured summary or just get your brand into an AI overview for your favored keywords, turning to long-form content writing could be the winning strategy.

Best Practices for Writing B2B Long-Form Content For Your Brand

Whether you’re a B2B content writer that’s looking to improve or a marketing employee tasked with writing your company’s next big (long) article, here are some quick tips you can follow.

Here are the best practices for writing B2B long-form content for your brand:

• Carefully Choose Your Topic: No one is reading content they’re not interested in. Especially since no one is reading content they’re not interested in for 5,000 words. Make sure that your long-form writing directly targets topics that your audience are interested in, that will help your customers and rank your business for keyword areas that matter to you. 

• Structure Is Your Friend: H2s, H3s, and if you’re feeling specific, h4s, are all your friends. Make sure your long-form writing follows a detailed structure. Using structure as much as possible allows your writing to remain coherent over a long period of time, while also helping the reader scan and navigate to sections that they’re most interested in. Which, speaking of, brings us to using a contents page. 

• Use a Table of Contents: As you can see on the left-hand side of this page, a table of contents helps orient your reader. Long-form content can last for 10+ minutes, meaning that your reader may want to jump around to sections they’re most interested in. Providing a table of contents streamlines the long-form reading experience.

• Make the Most of White Space: While it may seem that long-form content calls for sweeping paragraphs and pages of information, that doesn’t mean leading B2B writing strategies go out the window. Be sure to keep your paragraphs short and to the point while maximizing white space on the page. White space is effective, as it allows a reader’s eye to scan more easily, improving comprehension and retention.

While there is more to the story, these four tips are great to get started.

Final Thoughts: Drive ROI With Long-Form Content 

I have to admit, out of all the content writing services I offer, long-form writing happens to be my favorite. If you couldn’t tell from this article alone, I love going in-depth on a topic and hitting the core questions that relate to the central idea. 

If you want expert help from a seasoned B2B writer, I’m always just a message away. And, luckily, the message doesn’t have to be long-form – a simple hello and some project details are more than enough to get us started.

Let’s make industry-leading content together.