Some website pages are easy to forget about. You get the site built, add your services and contact details and move on to other jobs. Months later, those pages might still be sitting there with the same few lines of text you originally wrote.
This isn’t necessarily a problem. If a page is supposed to bring in customers and doesn’t tell them much about what you do though, it’s worth taking another look.
This is one reason thin content comes up in SEO (search engine optimisation). The term covers pages that offer very little useful information – whether that’s because they’re almost empty, rely on copied text or repeat information already found elsewhere on the site.
This doesn’t mean a page needs to be long to do its job. A short page can answer a question perfectly well. The issue is whether it gives visitors what they came to find.
Where might you find thin content?
Service pages are a good place to start looking. Some businesses have a page for every service they offer, but the wording barely changes from one to the next. If a visitor can’t tell what makes each service different, those pages probably need more thought.
Location pages can have the same problem. Listing every town you cover might seem like a sensible way to attract local searches, but swapping a place name into the same block of text doesn’t give people much useful local information.
Online shops should also check their product descriptions. Using the manufacturer’s wording is convenient, particularly when you have hundreds of products to list. However, other retailers may be using exactly the same text. Adding useful details, answering common customer questions or explaining who a product is suitable for can make your pages more helpful.
Is thin content bad for SEO?
Pages that offer little value may struggle to compete in search results. Google is trying to give people useful answers, not simply find a page that mentions the right keywords.
There’s no magic word count that fixes this. Adding paragraphs just to make a page longer won’t necessarily improve it. If the extra text repeats what’s already there, visitors aren’t gaining much from it.
Instead, consider what someone would reasonably expect to learn from the page. Does it explain the service properly? Does it answer common questions? Is there anything here that helps someone choose your business?
What should you do about it?
You don’t need to review every page on your website in one afternoon. Start with your main service pages and any pages that should be bringing in enquiries but aren’t performing as well as you’d hoped.
Improve the information where it falls short. If two pages cover almost the same thing, consider whether they would work better as one. If a page is no longer relevant, decide whether it should be updated, removed or redirected to a suitable alternative.
The goal isn’t to have the biggest website in your industry. It’s to make sure the pages you publish are useful to the people you want to reach. A handful of well-written pages can do more for your business than dozens that don’t really say anything.
If you need any help optimising your site’s content, please get in touch with us at Engage Web.
