Thin Content, Ecommerce & Reviews

[BeckyKey]

I've been reading a lot today about thin content and what constitutes thin content.

We have an ecommerce site and have to compete with large sites in Google - product pages in terms of content quantity are low and obviously competitors all have similar variations of the same product descriptions.

Does Google still consider ecommerce sites as with thin content as low quality? A product page surely shouldn't have too much content which  doesn't help the user.

My solution to start was to get our customer reviews added to the product pages to help improve the amount of quality content on this page, then move into adding video etc when we have resource.

Thanks

[BeckyKey]

Hi Everett

Yep, that all definitely makes sense. Sometimes with the more mundane products it's hard to make them stand out.

We do include most of this information but I'l review whether there;s anything we could add.

Thanks again

[Everett]

Becky,

"Thin" is a relative term when it comes to content. There is no hard-fast rule about how many words to have on a page, and let's not forget that words are not the only form of content. Multiple product images, product demonstration videos, user-generated reviews (as you mentioned) are all great types of content to have on a product page.

Seek to answer the obvious questions for the visitor, and do not use manufacturer-supplied content.

Some examples of "obvious questions" for the user:

• What does this product do?
• Why should I buy this product instead of the other one?
• Why should I buy from this merchant instead of the other one?
• What options do I have in terms of color, size, fit, threat-count, type, style...?
• What are the features?
• What are the dimensions?

If it only takes 100 words to answer all of the obvious questions then that's probably OK for most products. If it takes 300 words then that's what you'll need for a good user experience.

Think about your shoppers, not search engines, and you'll probably do fine. Your shoppers don't want to read the same product description that's on all of the other sites. They may want to read lots of feature / stats data if it's an expensive or complicated product, but probably not if it's a plain white T-shirt.

Good luck!

[BeckyKey]

Thanks!

Also along these same lines, we're always adding new product pages and over the next few months there will be a large amount of these added.

Is it a problem for Google if a lot of the site has 'thinner' content - in terms of ratio?

[BeckyKey]

Great thanks, yes I have started creating content, we just don't have a huge resource for producing it at the moment. It's something we're working on.

Thanks!

[BlueprintMarketing]

This I hope you find helpful as well and touches on then content and it is very recent.

https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/news/google-webmaster-hangout-highlights-08102015/

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts. I know it's old, but I think it does summarize what you should do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_NmnXn5A4

Basically, as always, it's all about user experience. I think that your idea about reviews on page is quite good. Also consider creating (besides good descriptions) supportive materials like posts about those products, reviews, video reviews, other related articles etc. and then link to those articles from descriptions or specific parts of product pages.

Hope this makes sense.