In the SEO game, good content is not a guarantee for a low bounce rate on your website. We, at 411 Locals, face challenges like this every day and will give you a piece of advice on how both how to turn low-quality content into neatly organized and how to proceed with good-quality content that is giving you high bounce rate.
As we have said many times before, keeping up with the latest algorithm updates is impossible. Besides, if you are happy with your current placement and you haven’t seen a huge drop in your traffic, you don’t have reasons to be worried, right? Then why do you feel your content might be treading on thin ice? Stay with us, our goal is to help you decide if your content needs merging, improving in some way, or just to be removed.
Not All Thin Pages Are Bad!
Thin content can most accurately be identified as low-quality pages that add little or no value to the reader. We recommend you check out the Google’s Quality Guidelines if you haven’t already done that. Pile up on some Google Analytics data about a page that you classify as a thin content page. You most often care about the page views, average time on page, and bounce rate. If you are satisfied with these rates but still you or somebody else finds your content thin – you have nothing to worry about. Let’s say you have a really well put video linked in your page that can add value and quality to your page, regardless the written content.
Improve Your Content
If you have, however, decided that your content needs editing, 411 Locals will share what has worked best for us during the years. Before anything, you will need to find what to improve. We advise you to be aware of the following:
- Duplicate Title Tags – As you already know, these should be original and unique. However, publishing articles on a regular basis may lead to duplicate titles and tags. Although it is unlikely that you get your site penalized for that, it is not recommended and you should really look into it.
- Duplicate Content – Be aware of small phrases you keep using all the time. They can be easily marked down as duplicated. Google bots can get you penalized for this. If there is not enough content on a page for the bots to distinguish, they might mark it down as duplicate, regardless the fact it seems unique to human eyes.
- Broken URLs – Broken URLs can cause duplicate content alerts. A piece of advice? Zap that messed URL with a 301 redirect.
When you are done with checking and improving pages that classify as thin content pages, you can actually read your text and do something to improve it. Sometimes rewriting the text is the easiest option.
In conclusion, you should always make sure that a certain page adds value for your visitors. After all, your content is there for your human visitors, and not Google bots. This is what we, at 411 Locals, have found out to work best!