Thin Content? Beefing It Up Can Catapult You to the Top

As the SEO agency evolves and advances, content must do the same. Unfortunately, this may mean that after a few months or years, your content is outdated or too thin. What exactly do we mean by thin content? Basically, thin content lacks value and offers nothing to the reader.

In SEO content writing, it’s important that the content on your page answers a question or resolves a problem for the reader. If the text on your site is thin and just stuffed full of keywords, your site will rank lower on the search engine results page. Cheap content is easy to find, but the reality is that it does nothing for your site rankings and can hurt your reputation and brand. You may save a few dollars up front, but your site will suffer in the long run if you don’t have engaging, relevant, helpful information to offer to your readers.

So, what is your best bet? Should you replace thin content or beef it up? We have a few suggestions to help you.

The Importance of Good Content 

What part does good content play in your marketing strategy? When it’s good, it can send your website right to the top. When it’s bad, it can cause Google to serve you penalties that are extremely difficult to recover from. Digital content can include many things, including any of the following:

• Blog posts
• Industry news
• Press releases
• Case studies
• Websites
• Articles
• Images
• Infographics
• Tutorials
• Social media posts
• E-books

Did you know that Google processes more than 3.5 billion results each day? In 1998, Google made it their mission to organize the information in the world and make it useful and universally acceptable. With this mission in mind, it’s easy to see how sites with good, informative content are preferred in a simple Google search.

Each piece of content is ranked by how useful and valuable it is to the reader. A content marketing agency would encourage you to create content that is the following things.

• Informative and useful: Say you’re launching a restaurant website; include the hours, contact information, the menu, the location and create a blog to share any fun upcoming events.
• More valuable and more useful: There are thousands of pages out there with information on how to choose a plumber. Make your content unique and use a different perspective from every other article on the internet.
• Credible: Cite sources, link back to resources and include reviews and testimonials from real customers.
• High quality: SEO content writing must be specific, unique and high-quality. When creating content, the goal is to provide useful information and a good user experience rather than rank high in search engine results.
• Engaging: Add images, regular updates, social media posts and comment boxes to stay engaged with your customers on a personal level.

The lack of good content can tank your SEO strategy. Now it’s time to determine if you have thin content and if so, what’s the best way to handle it?

Does Your Site Have Thin Content?

Simply put, thin content is anything that doesn’t provide value. It may be badly written or generated just to pull in clicks. Clicks are great, but if you can’t keep the reader on your page or coming back to it, then your marketing strategy is useless.

Full pages that are only used to stuff keywords are also thin. If you are unsure, consider if you would ever share something on your social media pages; if not, then it is likely not valuable to the reader.

Thin content is often short with just one or two paragraphs and has content that is repeated throughout your entire site. Remember that these become bigger problems when they are on a large scale. If you have just a few pages with shorter text, there may not be a problem, but if 70 percent of your site has short pages, it’s not likely you will be ranked high by Google.

Doorway pages, invaluable affiliate pages, auto-generated content and anything duplicated from another website can also be considered thin. You can identify if your content is thin by taking the time to read through it with a focus on the relevance and quality. Remember that long content doesn’t always rank better, but relevance and quality are vital.

How Can You Improve Thin Content?

The age old question is whether it’s best to remove thin content entirely or to beef it up. Fixing your content requires a little bit of instinct and a little bit of logic. As you audit your site, you’ll have to decide if you still need certain pages and what you should do with them. For example, you may have a blog post that ranks well and consistently gets hits. You won’t want to remove that even as you change your lower value content.

Content should be removed and maintained at least once a year. Remove posts that don’t apply to your current business, and start from the oldest. If you have URLs that still receive traffic, you can just redirect them to a similar post or page, or to your home page. The other option is to remove them and allow Google to focus on the more relevant pages on your site.

An even better way to handle thin content is to beef it up with newer, better, more unique stuff. Rather than copying a source, you want to become the source. Readers will share your content if it is insightful, useful, unique and helpful. Website content writing services are available to ensure that your pages are full of information that readers truly value. In turn, Google sees your site as more valuable and sends more users your way.

Where Should You Turn?

As your site progresses and you work to reach the top of the SERP, you’ll realize how important valuable content is. Hiring website content writing services to beef up thin content and replace it with useful information your readers will share with their friends can make all the difference in how your site ranks on all search engines.