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
-
What IS SEO FRIENDLY BEST PRACTICE FOR URLS FILTERED 'TAGGED'
EX: https://www.STORENAME.com/collections/all-deals/alcatel– Tagged "Alcatel", when I run audits, I come across these URLS that give me duplicate content and missing H1. This is Canonical: https://www.STORENAMEcom/collections/all-deals/alcatel Any advice on how to tackle these I have about4k in my store! Thank you
Technical SEO | | Sscha0030 -
Using "Div's" to place content at top of HTML
Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
URLs with dashes between words or nothing at all? ( ../some-content vs. ../somecontent)
Here's a quick and easy question: Is there any problem with not using dashes in between words for URLs? Obviously the readability factor is a concern, but from a search engine standpoint? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | tbinga0 -
Duplicate Content Issues
We have some "?src=" tag in some URL's which are treated as duplicate content in the crawl diagnostics errors? For example, xyz.com?src=abc and xyz.com?src=def are considered to be duplicate content url's. My objective is to make my campaign free of these crawl errors. First of all i would like to know why these url's are considered to have duplicate content. And what's the best solution to get rid of this?
Technical SEO | | RodrigoVaca0 -
If two websites pull the same content from the same source in a CMS, does it count as duplicate content?
I have a client who wants to publish the same information about a hotel (summary, bullet list of amenities, roughly 200 words + images) to two different websites that they own. One is their main company website where the goal is booking, the other is a special program where that hotel is featured as an option for booking under this special promotion. Both websites are pulling the same content file from a centralized CMS, but they are different domains. My question is two fold: • To a search engine does this count as duplicate content? • If it does, is there a way to configure the publishing of this content to avoid SEO penalties (such as a feed of content to the microsite, etc.) or should the content be written uniquely from one site to the next? Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | HeadwatersContent0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0 -
WordPress Duplicate Content Issues
Everyone knows that WordPress has some duplicate content issues with tags, archive pages, category pages etc... My question is, how do you handle these issues? Is the smart strategy to use robots meta and add no follow/ no index category pages, archive pages tag pages etc? By doing this are you missing out on the additional internal links to your important pages from you category pages and tag pages? I hope this makes sense. Regards, Bill
Technical SEO | | wparlaman0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Just signed up for pro and did my first diagnostic check - I came back with something like 300 duplicate content errors which suprised me because every page is unique. Turns out my pages are listed as www.sportstvjobs.com and just sportstvjobs.com does that really count as duplicate? and if so does anyone know what I should be doing differently? I thought it was just a canonical issue, but best I can tell I have the canonical in there but this still came up as a duplicate error....maybe I did canonical wrong, or its some other issue? Thanks Brian Clapp
Technical SEO | | sportstvjobs0