You have finally started your own website and running your own SEO campaigns. But despite all of your efforts, you find little or no success in what you do. You have been creating content but it does not give you the traffic you are looking for.
Given the initial result with what you are doing, you may have thin content on your website. Thin content is a common problem in many websites. This may be an article, a blog post, video, or any other form that offers a poor explanation or lacks information value to your user.
If you are doing SEO and even in your digital marketing strategies, thin content is a no-no.
Table of Contents
What is Thin Content?
Thin contents are contents that do not have any value or have low quality content. They are usually duplicate or somewhat appear to be the same material from another site or source, materials that are copy-pasted with little or re-arrangement made, auto-generated contents, and with invaluable link pages. It does offer any value to users and usually has lines of text on the page without any meaning or purposes and is only heavily laden with keywords that do not make any sense.
Thin Contents and SEO: How it Affect Your Ranking
While content is a major factor in your SEO strategies, it is important that your content makes sense and does offer value to your readers. Aside from the fact that search engines can identify thin content on your website, it can also reduce the overall quality of your website. If your website is heavily laden with thin content, it will reduce your page rank and will not get you anywhere.
Aside from your site performing poorly, users will easily know about it. They will most likely not stay on your website and will not want any transaction with you. You are not just losing a customer but their trust as well and the opportunity to build a connection with the. If you build your website with thin content, even if you manage to get high ranking in search engines with your thin content, it will only work temporarily. What is worst is that, Google may penalize you.
So how will you get rid of thin contents? Here are some ways to eradicate thin content on your website.
Steps in Eliminating Low-Quality Thin Content On Your Website
Review Your Content
One of the first steps in identifying thin content on your website is to review and check all of your write-ups. This process is called a content audit. Check if most of your content targets a keyword and nothing else. Ask yourself questions like, if you will be the one to stumble upon your content, will you be satisfied with? Are you going to abandon reading it and will you still look for others’ content in the search engine? If yes, your content then barely skim the surface of an important subject and does not offer any value to your readers.
Having non-sense content can also affect your SEO ranking. Search engines might perceive your content with having low quality and will rank you lower in searches. While eradicating thin content does not mean writing 3,000 to 4,000 words, you have to make sure that your readers will be to pick up value and information in your content.
Get rid of spammy pages
Have you added pages on your site that you intentionally placed as clickbait? If yes, then you have to remove it immediately. Clickbait is used to lure in readers to get them to click on to something. Once your readers have found out that this, they will likely lose trust over you.
While backlinks are important in your SEO campaign, It is also important to avoid having links irrelevant to your website. Never connect a link in your website that come from penalized domains, from links farms or link directories, from online gambling sites, or even from foreign language sites. You need to avoid building spammy pages as they might hurt your ranking.
Remove duplicate contents
Having duplicate contents in your content is sometimes unintentional. Though your goal is to always produce unique and original content on your website, you might still end up with duplicate content for a number of reasons.
In order to avoid duplicated content, you have to make sure that you have unique title tags, Meta descriptions, and keywords Meta tag in the HTML code. You have you to make sure as well that your heading tags differ from other page’s heading.
Want to use a repeated sentence in your site or even a paragraph like your company banner slogan? It is best to consider it making into an image and inserting in articles. Check also if two of your content targets almost the same keywords, it is most likely a duplicate content.
Takedown unnecessary pages
It is always better to prune your website with unnecessary and irrelevant pages. As Google continues to lean towards quality in its algorithms, having these pages can affect your website’s overall ranking. You might not know it but your website might be carrying a lot of thin content that might hinder you in obtaining a high score in Google’s algorithm.
Get rid of it these pages immediately. It will help you focus on audience-targeted topics and can open up your site for fresher new content.
Rewrite contents
There are some thin contents that are actually really good topics. If these are too good to throw around the bushes, then you have some reworking to do. If some of your content actually help set your brand apart a few years back, then keep it and start over.
If you have written about technology and it had a good run but it was written about 6 – 10 years ago, it will create little to no impact for end users these days. There had been so many changes in technology within those years and the blog post or article will be already outdated. Rewrite your topics into some more engaging and useful especially to your viewers and visitors.
Identify pages with a high bounce rate
Though some may argue that it is not already considered a part of the “thin content” category, it is essential to find pages that have a high bounce rate. While your goal is having a low bounce rate, high bounce rate pages happen when people do not find what they are looking in one of your pages and leave immediately.
Leaving your site and then going back to search results can be a bad thing as Google can analyze this. If it keeps on repeating, it will understand this and eventually give your site a lower ranking in search results.
In checking for pages with a high bounce rate, you can go to your google analytics account, review Landing Pages reports, and sort the pages by bounce rate.
Check your site regularly
The most essential thing you can do to eliminate possible thin content on your website is doing a regular audit. It will help you identify outdated content and will evaluate your content’s performance. You can also check if your contents are still relevant to your website or you have to do the necessary pruning to make sure your site is still at its optimum level.
Final Thoughts
Having thin content in your site can be a hindrance to your SEO success. While it may take more effort and time to totally eradicate thin content on your website, it will be most beneficial for you and your brand.
Before creating your new content, do not be afraid to ask yourself some questions. Does it offer value to your readers? Does your existing website content align with your new chosen content topic? Is it presented in an original way?
While SEO strategies continue to change every single year, the concept of content relevance stays the same today and even for the coming years. Having good content that offers value to your users will always be one of your golden tickets to make it on top.
About the Author
Maricar Morga worked as a marketing professional for almost a decade. She became part of the biggest real estate company/mall operator in the Philippines and handled concerts, events and community service-related activities. One of her activities became a nominee in the ICSC Asia-Pacific Shopping Center Awards 2018. Leaving her corporate job for good to pursue her dreams, she has now ventured in the path of content writing and currently writes for Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand. A Harry Potter fan, she loves to watch animated series and movies during her spare time.
