What is thin content? This is something you may have already heard about, and it’s an issue you want to fix on your website. Let me explain what it is and why it’s something you need to address.
You must have heard the phrase ‘Content is king.’ Although that is entirely true, Cyrus Shepard from Moz adds that:
“User is Queen and she rules the Universe”.
Search engines and your website users have one need in common. They both need good-quality words. You cannot gain the trust of your online audience, nor rank for any keyword, unless you write informative and useful content.
In order to do this, you should always think of your users’ needs. Can you guess what their Search Intent is?
If you write your web content thinking of what they need to understand, you can hardly write “thin content“.
I started working as an SEO Specialist in the early 2010s. Those were the days of keyword stuffing, of invisible keywords repeated hundreds of times, written in white on a white background, so that users wouldn’t see them. It was the so-called “search engine” text.
At that time, websites with thin content with little or no added value could rank highly quite quickly for competitive keyword queries in search engines.
Definitely, yes! You just submitted your clients’ websites to a number of directories with an automated process. Agencies were jealous of their lists of directories and wouldn’t show them.
No! The content on those sites was generally really thin. It was made by keywords and not much more. Websites copied useless pages from each other and they still managed to rank even higher than the original content creators.
The Panda update had one simple goal – to stop low-quality websites from ranking high in the search results. The update was built upon penalizing sloppy content practices, including duplicate content and poor quality copywriting that failed to provide a relevant solution to a user’s intended search query.
This update has been the first of a series of ‘earthquakes’ for website owners. It hit sites hard, affecting up to 12% of search results (a number that came directly from Google). Panda targeted thin content, content farms, sites with high ad-to-content ratios, and a number of other quality issues.
Read more: What is a Google Penalty and how to avoid it
You can discover this (for free) by running a Content Audit :
If you’d like to understand some of the results you obtained that don’t match your expectations, I’d be happy to assist you with a full Site Audit that will clearly show you any cases of duplicate, thin content, etc.
The first solution is to write amazing content on those pages.
If you use the Yoast SEO Plugin (which you can even use on your e-commerce store, if you have it as a Woocommerce, the e-commerce platform for WordPress) you can see the number of words your page contains. This will tell you if you have any keyword stuffing issues that should be addressed. Check our guide to the Yoast checklist for content optimisation. By following our checklist, you can create an informative and optimised piece of content easily, even if you’re a beginner.
Finally, make sure you run these content audits regularly (yearly, at the very least). The first time will be the toughest, as you will probably have much more work to do. But after the first time, it will be maintenance. Think about it – how can we get business from a site we don’t love and keep well-looked after?
See the video version of this article:
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