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Should I combine smaller articles into one large article?
I’ve been thinking about combining some of my smaller how-to articles (~1200-2000 words) into a larger how-to post (~7500 words) so that I can create a huge long-form article that would be more appealing to search engines and increase my chances for backlinks.
I would keep my smaller articles and not remove them or change anything. I would use the majority of their content in the larger post, except that I would remove some of the main keywords (so as to not cannibalize the smaller articles) and replace them with a new main keyword for the larger article. I would then set the larger article as a “pillar” and add its URL as a canonical tag in the smaller articles.
Does anyone have experience with doing this on their blog? Thoughts? Good idea? Bad? I was also thinking about putting them together to create a Kindle eBook instead. What do you think?
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3 Replies
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Red packaging content into new formats is great, books are good for entity building.
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Imo that’s not a good idea, from a mere fact that most readers dont bother reading after 500 words and I’m being conservative there. 1500 would be max.
The problem with combining all of those articles together is that the topic or content has a lot of keywords but dont specialise in any. It’s better to break off several pieces of content from it and have each of them specialise in one keyword. And then as you said have a pillar content and link it to the main content.
This way you have more changes of increasing and showing up on various topics than relying on your pillar content for it.
For eg:
Cars as the pillar content
Then break off into hybrid, electric, etc .
(Just a silly example)That’s my few cents as a person who worked in content. Nobody wants to read 7500 words on a webpage.
Maybe it would work better again as a pdf book (not kindle) but it needs to have evidential data and provide information as a way to create leads. Eg: social media platform, hubspot have these informative reports that are downloadable but they are always embedded in a article summarizing it.
All of this depends on your niche as well.
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No one has the patience and the time to read a 7500 words’ how-to post’. You will lose engagement, traffic and conversion. The best way to tackle this is to create a Topic Cluster. AKA content cluster, it helps in improving and strengthening your SEO efforts and strategies. Just make sure the links of your your articles open in a new window so that your readers will not only remain in the main page but also in other pages too. And should they want to reread or go back to to the original page they can do it easily without clicking the ‘back’ button.
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