One big page vs. multi-step pages
-
Hi mozers!
Brand new to SEO and LOVING it! Having several key questions that I don't see answered yet, but I'll start with one we've been very curious about.
Consider this guide we have for Forming a Delaware Corp.
https://www.upcounsel.com/Free-Legal/Guide/17/Form-A-Delaware-CorporationThis is our overview page, giving you a breakdown of what this process involves. We love this page, but (Question1:) does it lack better real "content" rather than lots of links to the guide process itself?
Then, you can start to walk through the guide beginning with step one, where each step has crowd sourced answers to it. But as you see, the step pages are all very similar, except for the answers and step info.
(Question 2) Would it be better to put all our answers into the one overview page and skip having separate pages for each step? We like the process and simplicity of seeing one step at a time, but then these pages don't seem to have enough unique content on them.
Related, at what point (if any) is a page too big with too much content and considered bad for SEO? We're recovering from a big hit from Google, and slowly recovering by nailing down various SEO mistakes. We DO have great, unique and valueable content - now we just need it to rank!
-
But, wouldn't you agree that testing is the only way to know for sure?
Yes, I agree. Testing is the only way to know for sure and I highly recommend it.
I have done enough testing with my own content on my own sites to decide this is the way that I am betting - every time I have appropriate content for this method. However, other writers on other websites might have different results.
Can you tell I'm on my testing soap box?
Glad you have a soap box... keep it ready at all times.
-
Hi EGOL. You make some good points. But, wouldn't you agree that testing is the only way to know for sure? I think making big changes to pages and structure based only on a hypothesis is not the best way to proceed. While long pages might impress visitors to some kinds of sites, they could be a huge turn-off to visitors on other kinds of sites. If you have an assumption that one way would be better than another, then the best thing to do is to test that assumption and find out if what you believe is really true or not.
If you are pleasing the search engines at the expense of your audience, what have you gained? You might end up getting more traffic, but what if they bail because the page isn't what they were hoping to find or it's too much for them to digest?
Can you tell I'm on my testing soap box? LOL, OK, I'll come down now.
-
I would do both!
I would place all of the answers on this main page... and I would have a link to the post page where the answer is repeated and the visitors have asked questions / left comments.
For search engines this gives you a really big page with lots of content... and it gives you pages with user content.
For visitors they can see all of the details on one big page without needed to click through to the post page.
At first, there is some small risk of duplicate content and of thin content on the post pages. However, you can solve this by increasing the amount of unique detail on the post page. (For example, answer one of the most frequently asked questions yourself which would add more unique content for search and also give that answer to visitors.)
I am a big fan of really big pages..... they pull huge amounts of long tail traffic, they impress visitors, and search engines should like them better than a collection of links.
-
There's really only one way to find out if one page structure/design is better than another and that's to split test your ideas. Optimizely.com is a great resource that has a one month free trial.
That being said, I personally don't think there's anything wrong with the page with the steps listed linking out to each step. Visitors generally will keep following a trail as long as they feel they are on the right track. I would be concerned that adding more content to the page might distract visitors from proceeding through the funnel, which is ultimately what you want them to do, yes?
Again, you won't really know that for sure unless you test one way versus the other. If you do test, look at your bounce rates in addition to funnel conversion rates. If one version has an excessively high bounce rate, this could be bad for SEO and would be something to consider when making any changes.
I can give you all kinds of personal opinion, but that's not really going to help you. I think you need to test test test. Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Who's best but affordable custom shopping cart provider (e.g. 3dcart, big commerce, shoppingcart)?
I'm planning to put up a buy and sell site for shoes where people can upload shoe listings on their own something like ebay.com though we're not the ones who will process the payment. The site we're planning doesn't have a buy/checkout button and paypal integration so it will look like a catalog. We will just add a contact number/email in the product listing so a buyer can contact and personally meet the seller. Let me know if this can be done in Wordpress + e-commerce plugins. I would also like to know if there are custom shopping cart providers that allow Facebook or Twitter login/sign up integrated in the platform. Let me know if this is also possible in Wordpress by adding a plugin. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
Duplicate page title caused by Shopify CMS
Hi, We have an ecommerce site set up at devlinsonline.com.au using Shopify and the MOZ crawl is returning a huge number (hundreds!) of Duplicate Page Title errors. The issue seems to be the way that Shopify uses tagging to sort products. So, using the 'Riedel' collection as an example, the urls devlinsonline.com.au/collections/riedel-glasses/ devlinsonline.com.au/collections/riedel-glasses/decanters devlinsonline.com.au/collections/riedel-glasses/vinum all have the exact same page title. We are also having the same issue with the blog and other sections of our site. Is this something that is actually a serious issue or, perhaps, is Google's algorithm intelligent enough to recognise that this is part of Shopify's layout so it will not negatively affect our rankings and can, essentially, be ignored? Thanks.
Web Design | | SimonDevlin0 -
How keywords per page to keep from being "spammy"?
Hi all, I am currently doing a marketing internship for a B2B company that does all sorts of out-sourced recruiting work. I have some experience with SEO, but not completely confident. My first question is, I know Google sees websites that load up on keywords as "spammy", so what is the appropriate number of keywords per page? Currently, I was thinking about this setup: 1 keyword for the URL 1 keyword per alt tag (1 per page, at most) 2 keywords per each title tag (approximately 4 pages that I am going to follow internally, not following the "about us" page). After that, I was thinking of adding 2-3 more keywords in each meta description and 2-3 in the body copy. That would equate to 6-8 keywords on each page, is this too many and should keywords be repeated (on the same page or across multiple pages)? Since this website is brand new (zero links), would it make sense to nofollow all of the internal links so that they homepage can gain ranking as quickly as possible within Google?
Web Design | | wlw20090 -
Website Blog causes duplicate pages
Hello, I added a blog to my website, which is hosted at weebly. I was told this would drive traffic but I have actually fallen way, way down in Alexa rankings. When I ran a campaign here, the results show over a 100 errors, all to do with the website blog. It states they are duplicate pages and titles. I dont see a way to rename the pages. Am I better off getting rid of the blog? Thanks
Web Design | | Gardengirl0 -
Mobile Site Pages: Word Count Help
Hi there I am doing a mobile website for a client and they asked me what the dieal word count would be per page. They are SEO conciosu but we are not doing SEO on this site. I would just like to know a general rule of thumb. Regards Stef
Web Design | | stefanok0