Unfortunately SEO ruins great, witty and brief marketing texts.
Maybe there's space for search engines that can summarize a page if it's long and give the user what they want.
In SEO terms the "get something done" is described as "user intent".
Imagine you have written an article describing how to change the oil in a Ford Mustang.
What title better fits user intent:
"How to change the oil on a Ford Mustang"
or
"An afternoon of tomfoolery, broken wrenches and dirty hands with an American classic"
If you are at all interested in people finding you on Google you need to have a title that's more like the former than the latter.
SEO content marketing is basically a descendent of direct marketing -- the stuff you used to get in the mail, in two-page spreads in Reader's Digest and so forth.
Direct marketers have known for a very long time that long-form copy sells better. They had the numbers to prove it long before "analytics" was a common idea -- the very term A/B testing refers to the "A" and "B" sides of a newspaper print roller being able to print two versions of an advertisement.
Source: Tested Advertising Methods by Caples. A fascinating, if depressing, read.
Really? That's interesting. But how could they tell which version converted better? Maybe distributing each version in a different area?
This perfect 50/50 split pretty much controls for all the plausible variables. Location, time of day, you name it, the odds of a reader seeing either A or B was exactly 50%.
Plenty of ecommerce sites ranks with very little text on their pages. What you are saying is just wrong.