Use both long-form and short-form content, but tailor them to what people are searching for. Long-form pieces with tables of contents work best for investigative queries like health topics. Keep everything over 500 words to rank better on Google.
Should you prioritize long-form or short-form content? You probably need to do both. Here's the deal with SEO. In the marketplace, different keywords have different requirements for what people are really looking for. So sometimes when people are investigating a topic, they really want to understand comprehensively what something's all about. That's the trend that you see in articles where there's a table of contents. The value of long-form content in that situation is that the person who's reading it can look at the table of contents and say, oh, I already know these couple of things. Let me click to the part of this article that what I really need to read. So if you're writing health-based information, being comprehensive is better because then you have an opportunity to give everyone some information and they can pick and choose what they really want. Short-form content does really well on social media. It does not do as well on Google. So the only rule of thumb that's a fact, if you will, is nothing shorter than 500 words. So keep your content longer than 500 words and write comprehensively as often as you can. You'll get the most traffic from that.
