A really common question we get from e-commerce website owners is this: “Do I have to worry about thin content on my ecommerce store?”.
Thin content (we’ll explain what it is shortly) can be a big issue for e-commerce sites, but as with everything in SEO the answer isn’t always so simple.
In this blog / video, we’ll explain what thin content is, what unique content is and why it’s important, whether or not thin content can perform and some top tips to help.
What is Thin Content?
Thin content refers to a webpage where either the A) length or B) quality of the content on the page is low.
typically when you’ve not put any content down, or your content is very short, or potentially even copied from a manufacturer’s site. But ultimately it comes down to content is just one ranking factor.
Why is Thin Content an Issue For E-commerce?
E-commerce websites are typically very large websites. you might have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, and 95% of those are going to be product pages.
You have your homepage, your content pages, your category, subcategory pages. Then, you’re going to have all of your product pages. So, when Google comes to crawl your site the majority of what it’s going to be crawling is product pages. It’s a big investment to write unique content on each one of those product pages. It is important from an SEO point of view.
Why Unique Content is Important?
First off, one of the things that we will say outright is having worked on a lot of eCommerce sites before, those that perform better than others, especially from a small business point of view, are those with unique content. They’ve put in the time and effort to write it.
Can Thin Content Rank?
There are 200 ranking factors, and you can have thin content and you can rank if all your other ranking factors are doing really well. So if you’ve got great links, great technical SEO, a great reputation, then you can rank.
If you’re a small business and you don’t have those things going in your favour then you need to pick up your wings where you can. So, making sure that you’ve got unique content on those product pages is going to give you those wings.
It is a long process but you can just work on your products within your key categories first. You do want to think if Google was coming to your website, and 90% of what’s there, your product pages, have got thin content that’s going to look poorly, it’s going to look poorly across your whole site. So, you do want to think about the impact that’s having.
Content Best Practice Tip
My recommendation is to try and stagger any amount of products you’ve got on your website. Don’t try and have thousands upon thousands straight away because that is just going to give you just this terrible thin content issue.
Maybe put a hundred up, and then maybe another hundred, so you’ve got a smaller website and you can manage those and add unique content to them as you go rather than putting them all live at once and suddenly you’ve got thousands of pages with no good content, and that is going to really not help your SEO in any way.
