You may hear the phrase “thin content” when people are talking about digital marketing. It is often hard to figure exactly what that means if you don’t live and breathe content marketing. In a nutshell, thin content is low-quality pages that add little to no value to the reader. A page or blog post that has little information or content that doesn’t match what you do or sell. Also, another type of content that often falls under the thin content umbrella is duplicate content, but we’ll get to that in another post soon.
The first step to seeing if your site has thin content is look over each page’s word count. In the past, 250 words for a blog post, for example, was fine. Now it’s 400-1000 or even better 2,500 words for longer topics (and to better drive search traffic). Google considers articles with under 300 words to be “thin content.”
When looking for thin content also consider that length isn’t the only factor in determining quality. Ask yourself:
- Does my content tell a story, solve a problem or answer a question?
- Is it engaging enough for my target audience to share?
You’ve Found Thin Content, Now What?
So, you’ve dauntingly poured over each page and post on your website, and you’ve located thin content. Now take into consideration these buckets to put your content into before you tackling what to fix:
- What is Crucial?
- What Needs to be Updated?
- What Needs to Go?
To further narrow down what needs to go or be updated, consider; Is it the start of something useful? Does it just need further information to be useful? If you can answer yes to these two questions, that’s how you know to keep the piece.
When looking at the copy, remember more isn’t always better. Just adding words to thin content won’t make it better for your readers or search. It’s time for your content to become useful and relevant. If you can’t do that, it’s time for that specific content to go.
After really decoding what content is useful and should be fixed on your site is updating all the content. Updating copy can be a time-consuming task so be sure to make the time to sit down and write.
Keeping Away From Thin Content After Clean-Up
So now that you’ve taken the time to clean up your site and get rid or fix the thin content issues let’s focus on keeping it cleaned up. Here are some content tips that will help you stay away from thin content:
- Keep content relevant to the site to maintain its overall theme
- Put the focus back on longer, more in-depth feature articles. Stay away from content that is under 250 words (there are a few exceptions).
- Regularly update content in all parts of your site to ensure it doesn’t become stale or irrelevant. Take down products or services that no longer apply to your business. Update high traffic blog posts.
- Unique content is key so cut down on collected aka aggregated content. It’s best to create content from scratch just for your site instead of using content from other sites.
Though it is time-consuming and can be monotonous, relieving your site of thin content is imperative to maintaining positive SEO rankings and positive reading experience. Take the time you need to clean your content up; we know you’ll be happy you did! If you find this project is way too overwhelming, you can reach out to our organic SEO team to help get everything in order.
Image Credit: Rawpixels.com/Shutterstock