Will shortening down the amount of text on my pages affect it's SEO performance?
-
My website has several pages with a lot of text that becomes pretty boring.
I'm looking at shortening down the amount of copy on each page but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.
Will shortening down the current copy have a negative effect on my SEO performance?
-
Had the same question, these answers are helpful, thanks!
-
I spend much of my time improving articles on a long-established site. Most of these articles are already long - 1000 to 3000 words - with multiple images.
The improvements are usually adding a new section to beef up the length and give the article relevance to a new suite of keywords or make it relevant to topics in the recent news. Do these help the rankings? If the site is already near the top of the first page for the root query, it usually doesn't. If it is deep in the SERPs at position 50 to 90 it usually does.
Regardless of how the ranking for the root keyword changes, these improvements often increase the traffic - because they expose the site to new keywords.
but then within the updated, shortened copy, integrating more target keywords naturally.
If you do a good job of this, I think you will get more traffic, and it might be a better result that moving the rankings up.
-
It could, but it also could help your ranking. The amount of text is not important as much as how relevant Google sees it compared to the search query, so if you are removing superfluous words and redundant passages they you should see an increase as your pages are more user friendly. If you remove good copy that was considered helpful then you would expect to see decreases.
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
-
Is it better to create more pages of content or expand on current pages of content?
I am assuming that one way of improving the rankings of current pages will be to create more content on the keywords used... should this be an expansion of the content on current pages I am optimising for a keyword or is it better to keep creating new pages and if we are creating new pages is it best to use an extension of the keyword on the new page – for example if we are optimising one page for ‘does voltage optimisation work’ would it then be worth creating a page optimised for ‘does voltage optimisation work in hotels’ for example and so on? I am guessing maybe both might help, this is just a question I have had from one of my clients.
On-Page Optimization | | TWSI1 -
SEO for page that is made up of multiple posts
When a page is made up of lots of individual wordpress posts, how should it be handled from an SEO perspective? Should the individual posts be hidden from the search engines and only the page url which contains all the posts collectivity be indexed? Page in question below: http://teammateworld.com/case-studies/ Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Rich_H0 -
I'm looking to put a quite length FAQs tab on product pages on an ecommerce site. Am I likely to have duplicate content issues?
On an ecommerce site we have unique content on the product pages (i.e. descriptions), as well as the usual delivery and returns tabs for customer convenience. From this we haven't had any duplicate content issues or warnings, which seems to be the case industry-wide. However, we're looking to add a more lengthy FAQs tab which is still highly relevant to the customer but contains a lot more text than the other tabs. The product descriptions are also relatively small. Do you think this will cause potential duplicate content issues or should it be treated the same as a delivery tab, for instance?
On-Page Optimization | | creativemay0 -
Deleted pages still registering as 404 pages.
I have a an all html site that I can only work on through the ftp. The previous marketing company ran a script that built thousands of location landing pages, but all they did was change the tags and headers and the keywords in the pages, other than that they are all duplicate pages. I removed them, but Google is reading them as 404 pages. How do I tell Google those pages don't exist? or do I just need to let the bots crawl it a few times and it will see that eventually?
On-Page Optimization | | SwanJob0 -
Will a on-page food/drink menu take away from my target keywords?
I am trying to rank for Chicago corporate events, so I am writing new content for a landing page. I have a description of our venue and why one should have a corporate event there, all content that is very rich in corporate event keywords. I then go on to say our drink packages and food packages. Overall, my actual keyword targeted content is 1/5 of the content and the other 4/5 is menu. At first I thought the more content the better, but now that I realize a lot fo the content is just saying different foods and alcohols I'm questioning my strategy. I'm going to do my metas and h1s and stuff with corporate event keywords. But is the menu going to get in the way of ranking for the corporate event keywords? Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | howlusa0 -
What's the best practice for implementing a "content disclaimer" that doesn't block search robots?
Our client needs a content disclaimer on their site. This is a simple "If you agree to these rules then click YES if not click NO" and you're pushed back to the home page. I have this gut feeling that this may cause an upset with the search robots. Any advice? R/ John
On-Page Optimization | | TheNorthernOffice790 -
SEO value of "in the news" links on home page?
Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this? What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0