Massive Review SEO

[Hazo]

Does anyone have any stats or research on how thier extra long reviews go compared to a regular review. I'm talking about 1500+ words.

The longer the review the more longtails you can get and more calls to action etc. But, how do they convert?

I see most ppl only have reviews around 5-700 words. Either this is because they can't think of anything else to write or they think it is optimal.

Please share your experiences.

[OPC]

Does anyone have any stats or research on how thier extra long reviews go compared to a regular review. I'm talking about 1500+ words.

The longer the review the more longtails you can get and more calls to action etc. But, how do they convert?

I see most ppl only have reviews around 5-700 words. Either this is because they can't think of anything else to write or they think it is optimal.

Please share your experiences.

I'm experimenting now with exactly that... I'll gladly share my observations when I'm able to make them...

[GregW]

I don't have any experiences, but as a thought you could combine the possible effectiveness of shorter reviews for conversion with the SEO benefits of a long review by using a javascript show/hide script.

You could keep the article short and write out the main review information as normal, then with the additional information you could use the show/hide to extend the article. The article would look easier to digest for the reader (possibly help with conversions), but then that large article and its content would still be on the page to help with SEO.

[Hazo]

Smart arse.

[Michael Martinez]

I don't write poker reviews and I don't count words in my articles but people tell me I tend to write about 1,000 words per article. I've found that if they get too long people skip to the end (or leave the page) and then ask me questions I've already answered.

I recently sat on a convention panel with other professional bloggers and everyone agreed that 1,000 words was about the limit of what the average surfer will read in a single Web page.

How you structure your articles helps your conversions. If you make them scannable by organizing the content through an outline or with clearly delineated sections, and break up the flow of copy with inserts, short lists, and images, you may experience better conversions.

I've written some pretty long articles that were just continuous flows of copy and they've done well or poorly, depending on how interested the visitors were in whatever I was writing about. Still, the more structure you provide the reader, the more easily the reader will extract your most important points.

[Ridge]

Most people don;t read a full review anyway, they just want the highlights. That is why the scanability of your pages is so important and why good pages use good htags. That being said, I hate to see short reviews with no real info, you are doing yourself any favors by doing this.

Have a quality review there, if it takes 500 or 1000 words just be sure its quality. More info is usually better + more potential longtails, as long as your page is formatted nicely then your calls to action will not get lost in the info.

[MJ]

I'm of the belief that, along with what Randy just eluded too - it's better to properly build your directories so that the info can be spread via more pages, rather than more headings and paragraphs per page.

[Michael Martinez]

I'm not a big fan of paginated articles myself unless the navigation is easy and the pages are not too thinly populated with content. If a page has more advertising and navigation than copy, it's too thin for me.

Paginated articles may increase your search visibility over single page articles (it depends on a lot of factors -- let experience be your guide).

[MJ]

I guess I meant I prefer to expand a subject like "google" into lots of 700 word pages, rather than a 2,500 word page.

/google/
google/adwords/
google/adsense

using that as an example rather than having /google/ with those headings and 1,000 words for each.