Word count and ranking/traffic
-
Hello All,
Recently, a client of ours enlisted another firm to redesign their website, www.thepodhotel.com. The new site went live on February 20th. Since that date, we have seen a 30% drop in Google Organic traffic, year-over-year. Even a cursory glance at the site will tell you that there was quite a bit left on the table, from an SEO point of view. However, my question pertains to word count. The word count on the new site is quite a bit lower than the old site. How much value do you feel this has on rankings? Do you feel that, among the many other items that need to be addressed, we should be focusing on creating more copy?
I appreciate all of your input.
Frank
-
Hi there,
Unfortunately the site seems to be down right now, so I can't have a look (I'm getting a 500 unavailable error), but I would say that while copy is important to give Google an idea about the page's topic, copy for copy's sake is not necessary. In other words, as long as the page says enough to get the message across about what it's meant to convey, you don't need to add another 200 words for no reason.
That said, each page should contain a good paragraph or so of unique text in most cases. I don't love putting minimums on the number of words that should be used, but keep in mind that text presented as images, etc. should use a technique like CSS image replacement in order to show that text in a search engine readable format, i.e. HTML.
I would not be confident that this has caused your 30% drop in traffic unless the pages are now extremely void of unique content and could be seem as "duplicates" or near-dupes of each other as a result, or simply as not very useful. On the other hand, if there are SEO errors with the site already, a big drop in content will certainly not help.
Get that 500 error checked out!
-
Hey Frank,
In my experience, an appropriate amount of copy on a page is generally beneficial to your SEO. By 'appropriate' I just mean a 'natural' amount of text for a given page - so for example a blog post might do really well having 1.5k+ words whereas a Contact Us page is only going to get value from a handful of words (NAP, etc).
I personally haven't tested this too much myself but going by what I've seen from the results of other people's testing and tinkering in this area, I'd be inclined to flesh out some of the pages with some copy that includes a sprinkling of whatever keywords you're gunning for. Having said that, you really want any copy on a site to be valuable to visitors - quality over quantity.
Hope that helps!
Cheers
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
-
Embedded twitter post is good for https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust-machine seo
We have short video posts on twitter. Embedded twitter post is good for https://www.fitness-china.com/hip-thrust-machine SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | ahislop5740 -
Rankings have dropped but why?
Recently our keywords have plummeted with regards to anything hen related on our stag and hen website. We were on the first page ranking 6<sup>th</sup> for terms such as Newcastle hen and hen weekend Newcastle. Now were around 15th this has also began to happen with other keywords. Content wise our pages score 90+ on page optimisation, we do have various keywords on the pages alike our competitors and use the highest searched for term as our page title. Our page speed is good on mobile and desktop. I’m struggling to see why we can’t seem to crawl back up to the first page when people who are outranking us have minimal content on slow sites. I know we lack back links but this can't be the only reason? Our website is hangoverweekends.co.uk
On-Page Optimization | | andy_simpson0 -
Why ranks my site so bad?
hello together, i think, that you read questions like this very often, but i hope someone has some good ideas for me. https://goo.gl/3iOmcqy with the keyword "sophos sg 210" we rank very bad. But i don't know why 😞 We have trust elements, a very good "avergage time on page" unique content... But i don't know, what can we make better 😞 Thx you so much
On-Page Optimization | | enbitcon0 -
Google Page Rank has no any rankings as of now. what to do?
my domain and page authority is working well right now but my Google Page Rank has no any rankings as we speak. What to do now? can some of you give me advice on this? Thank you very much in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Panoramictrip0 -
A / B Split testing
If you have developed a server-side A / B split testing tool. How do you avoid that Google will think you are doing cloaking. When a user enters www.xxxxx.com/xxxxxx/ he gets either version 1 or version 2 back from the server on the same url. If the user does not accept session cookies he will always get version 1.
On-Page Optimization | | Stener0 -
Any SEO effect(s) / impact of Meta No Cache?
Hi SEOMoz Guys, Hope you guys are doing well. I've been searching online and bumped into this archived page (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/34982/meta-nocache-affect-ranking). I would like to get an updated take on this issue whether or not the meta no cache code on a page bears negative/positive or no SEO impact / effect. <meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" /> <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/> Thanks! Steve
On-Page Optimization | | sjcbayona-412182 -
Why is this page ranking highest?
I've just used Open Site Explorer to compare some sites whose (unpaid) Google ranking I aspire to. They all have higher authority than my site, but the top ranking site out of the 3 I've looked at has the lowest Page Authority, hardly and links (when the others have hundreds), lowest page rank and lowest page trust. In fact, when you look at the top ranking page (ranks #1), it does not even have the search term in it as a complete phrase. One thing I do notice is that it does have 100,000s of linking root domains from one linking root domain. So how can it rank number one on Google?
On-Page Optimization | | Beemer0 -
Are Forum Links To Website Causing Rankings To Drop ?
For many years our top keywords hve ranked in top 5. Usually top 3 for a few in particular. The last few months those particular keywords have dropped to 25 +. Our other rankings are doing pretty decent and are remaiing the same. We are members of about 6 forums since they relate to our website and sometime we have contests on them. I do know that the forums are based on those particular keywords and are linking to our website, as well as other forum members linking to us. Each forum has roughly 300 links to our website. It does not seem as if our competitors are affected by this, as they are members of the forums as well. What could be causing this for these certain keywords? If those forums were affected by Google's new algorythm would this have an affect on our website?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0