Have a look at your website and search all your main pages and be honest: are they thin on content? Are there only a couple of paragraphs per page that do not clearly articulate your product or service. Poorly worded web pages that are extremely light on content is going to harm your SEO and Google rankings. No doubt about it….if you think you can scrape by with just a few sentences for all your web pages, then you are in for a big surprise. Google is not going to rank or push these pages. Having really good content that’s over 500 words per page is a SEO winner and NOT an SEO killer.
OK, So My website has Little content , what can I do?
The first thing to do is get really proactive. Don’t be daunted by the size of the task. The best thing to do is break your website down into main landing pages, that is, the pages that most people are looking at and focus on these in the short term.
Look at 1 page at a time and start by looking at the current content and modifying and adding copy to each page. If it is a services page, look at what you are doing and expand on this. But the key thing that I really want you to get out of this is that you must keep adding content regularly not only to your website but to each individual page.
Why?
Cause this is going to trigger to Google spiders to come around to your website looking for fresh new content to index. The more you publish, the more it will come around and the higher your rankings for certain pages…so on and so forth.
If you don’t update your website there is really no need for Google to come to your site and this will leave the door wide open for your competitors to get in these are start beating you online. This is why you HAVE TO BE PROACTIVE when it comes to adding, creating, modifying content. The basic rule of thumb here is the more content you add the better off you will be.
I just want to add 3 points here that you should be aware of when auditing your website for content and making the necessary amends.
1) Never write more than 1 or 2 blog articles per week – I see companies adding over 10 blogs or news articles per week in the hope of dominating their niche and completely obliterating the competition. This is spammy and can look like you are acting in an unnatural manner. This may be good in the short term BUT it CAN get picked up by Google and you may pay the price for this type of over activity. Be as natural as possible in this space and the rewards online will follow.
2) Watch out for blogs that start to get repetitive – over time the more your contribute to your site, articles may start to sound the same. Watch out for this as duplicate content is a strict violation of Google’s guidelines. If you think that your starting to sound stale, perhaps get a staff member to start writing – this can give a whole new perspective and slant to the way your content sounds.
3) Lastly, be original. The temptation may be there to copy and paste content from another source but this is going to be detected and will get your site penalised – try not to take the easy way out with this.
Your web pages need to keep on growing. It is a constant process that cannot be ignored. I am only saying this because I know how quickly content marketing is becoming the favoured approach with some SEO companies – SO if you are not actively adding pages, then the guys who are dominating page 1 will be. End result = You loose.
Remember: This rule of adding content should be rigidly applied to all pages that you deem to be thin. Be honest with yourself and never brush this fact under the carpet cause the only one who is loosing out is you.
