How Many Words To Make Content 'unique?'
-
Hi All,
I'm currently working on creating a variety of new pages for my website.
These pages are based upon different keyword searches for cars, for example used BMW in London, Used BMW in Edinburgh and many many more similar kinds of variations. I'm writing some content for each page so that they're completely unique to each other (the cars displayed on each page will also be different so this would not be duplicated either).
My question is really, how much content do you think that I'll need on each page? or what is optimal? What would be the minimum you might need?
Thank for your help!
-
Great question, and great answers from some of the other commenters. I've struggled with this question myself in building landing pages. The 20% rule is a good one, and makes sense, especially as Google gets better at semantic search and "keywords" become a bit less important in favor of query meaning. In a perfect world (one where search engines could understand queries the way your friend would when you told him what you searched for), if you cannot come up with 20% of a landing page that is entirely unique to that page, it's not something you should be building a landing page for. In the world we operate in, it's a nice guideline. My method for long tail landing page creation is: figure out what the head keyword that this long tail landing page is most related to (if you are trying to reuse the same value prop), and just rewrite every sentence. You should alter your word choice, sentence structure, and page organization (it's a nice opportunity to test those things as well, a long tail page that does unexpectedly well may give you some insight into a better converting format). At this point, I add the unique content. For keywords that aren't different enough to have true unique content, I'll generally write a section summarizing a few of the others all together, or add a different customer testimonial. To the commenter who mentioned that you can create unique content to search engines, but humans would laugh - a landing page for long tail keywords really shouldn't be something a customer can get to without coming to it from an external referrer. The root domain shouldn't link out to both domain.com/landing-page-head-kw and domain.com/landing-page-long-tail-kw.
-
Good Morning.
I am going to come at this from a slightly different viewpoint. There is a difference between rewriting an article to suit your needs by adding/cutting/modifying an article to suit your website, and simply spinning an article.
I'm being slightly presumptuous simply for the sake of discussion and from personal experience cleaning up a website full of this sort of content. EGOL, a Samauri Mozzer said a long time ago on another SEO board far far away that one day search engines will rate websites on content alone, and nothing else. It seems like that statement is coming true.
The recent updates, and even dating as far back as updates like Hummingbird have all pointed toward the importance of relevant, powerful, new content. Google new EAT standards even supported that more; expertise, authoritative, and trustworthiness. In my opinion, Google is trying to emulate how a human would search for things, the days of tricking Google into thinking your website is something that it isn't are close to being over.
Right now I am cleaning up a website that has content that is different enough to satisfy Google (at least to the point of not getting manual actions), but similar enough that any person who reads it laughs. We were getting plenty of traffic, but people were leaving once the noticed the similarity in the content.
It's tough to truly advise tactics without looking at a website, and again I am not suggesting you are spinning articles, trying to pull the wool over Googles eyes. I merely bring up another point.
I have learned that getting to the top of Google really is only half the battle. You still have to convert the people once the get there. You have an opportunity here to not ONLY satisfy Google, but also convert customers. Writing unique content that not only meets the needs of Google, yet ALSO convinces someone to purchase a car, in that moment.... well that's a win win! I would suggest spending the extra time writing individual content. It will help in the long run. And in the event that Google gets even better at determining duplicate content somehow, you are protected!
If shortcuts were easy, they would just be the way. This may be faster, but in the long run, it probably won't help as much as spending the time to write them all out.
I need a new car....
-
Do you have dealerships in each of those locations?
Usually content written exclusively for the search engines and not for users is not the best type of content.
-
The easiest and quickest answer to there is there is no word count limit but I would suggest you to look in to your competitors, see how they are writing and what kind of content they are producing on this pages.
If mostly people are writing long content pieces then you probably have to go with more words but if they are writing short, you have a margin.
Plus you should use creativity in your content that convince potential customer to convert. Like use of images, infographics, testimonials and more will help to a greater extent.
Hope this helps!
-
Thank you for your response.
this is really helpful, so essentially 20% is the minimum, but more than this would help?
-
HI There,
Thank you for your response.
THe purpose of the text is not as such to sell the car to the user (in this instance), we do have text on each individual car about its perks, technical specs etc. This page is simply for displaying lists of cars, with the content only really needing to introduce the cars as to appease search engines.
So essentially the content is for the search engines benefit in the sense that it will differentiate it from other pages and is hopefully therefore more likely to get indexed and bring us traffic for the long tail keywords that are being targeted.
Lots of content might definitely overwhelm users so really im trying to find the right balance of uniqueness and quantity!
-
This totally depends on too many variables for me to say (I think anyway).
Personally, I wouldn't overwhelm your visitors with too much wordy text - they're interested in test driving your cars and possibly buying one, NOT reading a load of gumph on the cars. Either they like the cars or they don't, obviously you need to include the benefits and features of each vehicle, but really I wouldn't write huge volumes of text because that'll put people off.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
How many serp results for a domain.
I thought this one was carved into stone, max number of results from the same domain in SERP is... two. Or... three?! I was searching for some familiar keywords and found three results from the same domain, isn't that... unusual?
Technical SEO | | max.favilli1 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Content Based on User's IP Address
Hello, A client wants us to create a page on two different sites (www.brandA.com/content and www.brandB.com/content) with similar content and serve up specific content to users based on their IP addresses. The idea is that once a user gets to the page, the content would slightly change (mainly contact information and headers) based on their location. The problem I am seeing with this is that both brandA and brandB would be different Urls so there is a chance if their both optimized for the similar terms then they would both rank and crowd up the search results (duplicate content). Have you seen something similar? What are your thoughts and/or potential solutions? Also, do you know of any sites that are currently doing something similar?
Technical SEO | | Rauxa0 -
Syndicated Content Appearing Above Original
Hi. I run a travel blog and my content is often re-posted by related sites with a backlink to my content (and full credit etc) but still ranks above my article in Google. Any ideas what I can do to stop this happening? Thanks
Technical SEO | | ben10000 -
Website's stability and it's affect on SEO
What is the best way to combat previous website stability issues? We had page load time and site stability problems over the course of several months. As a result our keyword rankings plummeted. Now that the issues have been resolved, what's the best/quickest way to regain our rankings on specific keywords? Thanks, Eric
Technical SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Does 'framing' a website create duplicate content?
Something I have not come across before, but hope others here are able offer advice based on experience: A client has independently created a series of mini-sites, aimed at targeting specific locations. The tactic has worked very well and they have achieved a large amount of well targeted traffic as a result. Each mini-site is different but then in the nav, if you want to view prices or go to the booking page, that then links to what at first appears to be their main site. However, you then notice that the URL is actually situated on the mini-site. What they have done is 'framed' the main site so that it appears exactly the same even when navigating through this exact replica site. Checking the code, there is almost nothing there - in fact there is actually no content at all. Below the head, there is a piece of code: <frameset rows="*" framespacing=0 frameborder=0> <frame src="[http://www.example.com](view-source:http://www.yellowskips.com/)" frameborder=0 marginwidth=0 marginheight=0> <noframes>Your browser does not support frames. Click [here](http://www.example.com) to view.noframes> frameset> Given that main site content does not appear to show in the source code, do we have an issue with duplicate content? This issue is that these 'referrals' are showing in Analytics, despite the fact that the code does not appear in the source, which is slightly confusing for me. They have done this without consultation and I'm very concerned that this could potentially be creating duplicate content of their ENTIRE main site on dozens of mini-sites. I should also add that there are no links to the mini-sites from the main site, so if you guys advise that this is creating duplicate content, I would not be worried about creating a link-wheel if I advise them to link directly to the main site rather than the framed pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0