How to identify and fix thin content
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Do you struggle to create content that performs well on Google or fail to get any real engagement from your audience? If so, then thin content issues could be one of the reasons why.
At Embryo, we understand the importance of producing high-quality content that guarantees organic growth for our clients. Our SEO and Content teams work closely to ensure that the content we create is well SEO-optimised and ultimately serves a purpose for the user.
If you want to improve the quality and quantity of your website’s content, then the talented team at Embryo is here to help.
What is thin content?
Now, let’s take a look at what thin content is, how it impacts SEO performance, how to identify it, and what you can do to fix it!
Thin content is a type of content that serves very little purpose or value to the end user. A lot of the time the content doesn’t follow the search intent or provide a valuable in-depth answer to the topic that the user wants to learn more about.
This type of content tends to have lower word counts, whilst this isn’t always a bad thing, thin content usually lacks both quality and quantity and has mainly been written for the sole purpose of performing well in Google with little thought about the end users experience.
Since the Google Panda update was released in 2011, we have seen Google crack down on low-quality websites that produce poor or duplicate content. Google now places a lot of emphasis on E-E-A-T signals and rewards content that showcases high levels of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
How can thin content impact your SEO performance?
We’ve looked into what thin content is, and now let’s talk about the 5 ways it can impact your SEO performance.
Publishing thin content on your website is likely to lead to a poor user experience. If a user visits your site to read about a particular topic but finds that the content lacks quality and depth, they’ll likely bounce off your website to view competing articles instead that provide more value and a better experience.
Earning backlinks is a great way to grow your domain authority, as it effectively counts as a vote of confidence to Google that another website is willing to reference your site in the form of a backlink.
If your content is thin, lacks depth, or doesn’t add value to the reader, there’s very little chance that it’ll naturally get linked to by other websites, compared to competing content pieces that answer the user’s query in far greater detail by providing relevant industry insight, expertise and data.
As mentioned earlier in the article when we spoke about the Google Panda update, Google’s algorithm is very well-trained in spotting and punishing websites that produce low-quality content. This could be in the form of devaluing your content which causes ranking drops in the search engines or more severe cases, a manual action penalty.
There is currently a Google core update rolling out at the moment that is looking to reward useful content created by smaller publishers. Here is a quote from John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google:
‘Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search’
As thin content is likely to reduce the quality of your page, publishing many forms of low-quality, thin content throughout your website will also have a bigger impact on the overall authority of your website, both in the eyes of users and Google which won’t be doing any favours for your brand.
Thin content that isn’t well structured or covers a particular topic in detail could lead to potential keyword cannibalisation issues, especially if a website has a range of identical content pages that are ranking for the same keywords.
These types of pages will confuse Google as it’s unclear to them which page they should be ranking higher in the search results.
5 ways to identify thin content
It should be clear now that thin content provides very little value to your website and users, but exactly how do you identify it?
1. Site-wide content audit: The first thing I would recommend to identify thin content is to carry out a site-wide content audit. This is where you will export all of your main content pages (such as your blog) and review word counts, traffic, ranking changes, types of keyword rankings, and impressions to get a numerical overview of the performance of your content.
Just from analysing this data, you should be able to highlight any pages that don’t look to be adding any value to your website.
2. Website crawl: Crawling your website using tools like Screaming Frog is a great way to identify similar pages on your website. Just from one crawl, you can get a snapshot of the meta titles, meta descriptions, and URLs of your pages to see if it looks like you are covering repeated topics.
3. Review your keyword rankings: Your keyword rankings can give you a great indication of how well your content is performing in the search results. Typically, thin content ranks for a very low amount of keywords or has seen declines in ranking performance over time.
You can also use your keyword ranking data to see if other content pieces are competing for the same terms and causing potential keyword cannibalisation issues for Google.
4. Search engine results page review: Reviewing the Search Engine Results Page is the best way to see what type of content Google is rewarding for a particular search query. Simply comparing your content against other well-ranking pieces will give you a good indication of what needs to be done to outperform them in the rankings.
Our in-house tool, Intermingle, is a great way to review the SERP landscape and competition of your target keywords. Check out a snapshot of it in action below:
5. Plagiarism detection tools: Running your content through a plagiarism checker will let you know if the content on your website is duplicated. If so, then it’s unlikely that your content will be providing any unique insight or value to the other if it has been scraped from elsewhere.
Remove, expand, and combine: How to fix thin content
Once you have identified thin content on your website, it’s important to follow appropriate steps to fix it so it avoids becoming a problem further down the line.
If you feel that your content contains old information or offers no value to your website from a user and SEO perspective, I’d recommend removing it. However, if you decide to delete your content, make sure to redirect it to its closest alternative and update any inlinks to the old page.
Another option is to expand your thin content by adding further value. This could involve covering the topic in more detail, updating old information, enhancing E-E-A-T signals, adding unique data as well as ensuring that you match the search intent and provide more value than the other competing articles.
If you notice that your website contains multiple pieces of content targeting similar areas, it could be a good idea to consolidate those pieces into a more in-depth guide that covers all angles of the topic, rather than touching on each one individually.
Would you like to improve your content output?
Hopefully, after reading the above article you now have more of an understanding of what thin content is, why it’s important to avoid it, how to identify it, and most importantly, what you can do to fix it.
If you are still wanting more advice on content best practices, then our expert SEO and content team will be happy to help you. Get in touch with us today.
