Agencies big and small are always banging the drum for publishing content marketing with a high EEAT score.

Now, that’s all well and good- but what if the website is stuffed to the rafters with well-duplicated or content-thin pages already?

What if there’s so much overlapping content that Google’s algorithm has to figure out what the main page is for that particular product or service?

Well, this is a real dilemma for businesses: it damages the user experience, wastes crawl budgets, and can severely damage your organic SEO.

However, have you checked your Google Search Console lately?

Well, it could be crammed with pages which are “crawled but not indexed”, which can mean, well, the work hasn’t met the bar.

Google Search Console, or more precisely, its algorithm, has acted like door supervisors, turning the work away.

How do we start fixing our content-thin page dilemma?

Well, read through every page- can they be improved?

Are some pages, well, just half-baked? Can they be improved with a bit of elbow grease?

Have your staff or appointed SEO agency shown they have a bit of flair for what they are talking about? Showing original perspectives, thoughts, and experiences (EEAT)?

Or is it just marketing waffle?

Tell me more about thin content?

Time is precious, our most valuable resource on this planet.

Therefore, don’t waste it, plus don’t waste people’s time by writing, well, work with a low EEAT score that’s thin on offering poor advice.

What you have to do is really embrace the concept of EEAT- that is, show you’re an expert.

The problem often boils down to time: an agency with copywriters paid close to a pittance isn’t going to have the enthusiasm to write a stellar piece of content marketing every time they are tasked with doing so.

For that, you need marketing companies that have experts in their respective fields or to publish less, but publish higher quality work.

That’s why top marketing agencies are often needed to deploy the expertise within your company and ensure it spills over into how your businesses content marketing is written.

Again, it comes down to time: people have questions and want them answered with the best possible advice. Don’t waste their time, or your own, on writing 700 words+ of vaguely related advice that’s written in a blind rush.

 

Satisfying search intent

Imagine your content marketing like it’s being evaluated by boffins with a clip-board- what do we mean by that?

AI and Google RankBrain monitor dwell time, if the shopper dives back into the SERPs to visit a competitor’s website, and bounce rates increases sharply Google will know. This is a piece of cake to monitor, since they (Google) use Chrome and Android, which gives them more data and a better understanding of “engagement” than, well, pretty much anyone.

Put simply, you don’t answer the blooming question, shoppers go elsewhere.

Duplicated content, which this whole post is about, means well if the answer is half-baked; as a lot of blog posts can be, you’re not going to satisfy search intent.

As a matter of fact, the bounce rate will be high and elevated for sustained periods; shoppers who read a couple of paragraphs of text are likely to say, “What is this load of rubbish?”

Resulting in high bounce rates reflected in your business’s Google Analytics account.

 

Tell me more about the plague of thin content

• Duplicated content marketing
• AI Generated
• Quickly written blog posts
• Low Value pages

All of the above could be deemed a “low value page”; too many of these can hamper SEO performance moving forward.

Rather than running your website through an automated checker, it’s often best to hire an agency with a top expert SEO consultant. This is so they can manually check and have a good look at where some main pages rank, plus devise an improvement plan.

The next stage will be checking with a plagiarism checker and an AI checker, just to see the scale of the issue of having low-quality pages. For example, is it just a few of the main product pages, or do we have AI issues across the whole website? However, first have the SEO company identify a bunch of pages that are content-thin just by having a good read; this is often best, as the most important sales pages can be worked through first.

 

Duplicated content marketing

It’s a big problem- countless websites, from brochure websites to e-commerce websites, have duplication issues. Pages where either the duplication is intentional, or the CMS has just duplicated a bunch of pages because it’s been set up that way.

However, let’s say you’re selling blenders, well, how is Googlebot supposed to figure out which page to index if you have 7 duplicates of the same page all selling the same thing? Google will decide, however, what’s likely to happen because the website has such a large duplication issue; well, it’s most likely to rank a load of competitors above your business.

 

Every page should be unique.

This is a concept that some web design agencies, especially, struggle with. That is, if you really want to rank high in the SERP’s, duplication shouldn’t occur, especially on mass! You need each page to be unique, written by a human, not AI, and to offer high-quality information.

Then you place all the good stuff onto that, the internal links, on-page SEO, etc.

 

Ai Generated Content

Businesses up and down the land are using LLM’s to write content, while they butcher the sentences so they pass AI checkers. This is so their clients or management give the work the okay to publish.

Hmm, what happened to the creativity of the human soul?

That’s what is needed. I have over 11 years of experience in this game, which helps content marketing soar to the top of Google on a weekly basis.

How?

Because we do as the name suggests at Walsh & Partners, we partner. We leverage the expertise within your business, collaborate, and create content marketing that’s so good that, combined with such effective link-building campaigns, the competition cannot come close.

 

Blog posts lacking depth sound repetitive.

Okay, Googlebot is crawling and indexing a brand-new blog post, that’s written by a copywriter.

The copywriter has written “7 steps to content marketing success”

The copywriter is happy with the work; he’s gone on lunch and bought a meal deal, and he’s happy to be taking a break.

However, well, how many pieces of content marketing exist on planet earth about how to write content marketing?

Millions, perhaps billions of pieces?

So, when the copywriter is munching on his ploughman’s, it’s likely Googlebot, and the algorithm will, in a split second, decide that the works won’t be indexed. Its content is thin, rubbish, written to reach 1,000-word limit and doesn’t offer useful advice.

 

Duplication issues for e-commerce businesses

Okay, so a web designer has sent across an eye-watering quote to set up your brand-new e-commerce website for you.

You’ve remortgaged the house

Sold the cat

Paid the web design bill.

However, what so many start-ups and businesses forget is that, well, that’s just the web design bill. This doesn’t include the cost of creating and proofreading content marketing, so as to populate the product pages.

Therefore, sometimes hundreds of duplicated product descriptions are created, all copied and pasted from the manufacturer’s website which often get slapped on the website.

Then what about all the other business owners who have remortgaged their houses and sold their cats to set up the business also?

Yep, they have duplicated content marketing, too- hundreds of businesses, all with shallow duplicated content marketing.

Google hates it; it either doesn’t index it, or if it does, you’re held back by the leading e-commerce players who understand EEAT, Helpful

Content Marketing, and have enough staff offering verdicts, opinions, and original perspectives that they outshine the duplicated mass of product descriptions that your web designer has pasted over.

 

Think EEAT, think YYML, think Helpful Content Marketing

Google loves to roll out updates.

SEO agencies call these Google algorithm updates, which cause ranking flux.

Now there’s been EEAT, which wasn’t so much an update more guidance, and to enforce that guidance, it’s baked into the algorithm somewhere. There was the YMYL update, then the Google Helpful Content Update.

What are you talking about, all of these updates for?

Simple.

When you get lazy in SEO, a big Google algorithm can roll out, slap you across the face like a sea bass and your ranking plummets.

Don’t be slapped in the face by a sea bass.

Implement good work.

I have a ton of content thin content on my website- what’s the impact likely to be?

Consistent blogging of thin content, or, let’s say, a website that’s been set up to be content-thin from the get-go, means low visibility.

Which means ranking low.

The topical authority score, the domain authority, and the quality score are all low.

The EEAT score will be low.

But don’t despair, it’s time to get fitness crazy, upgrade those pages, rewrite them, improve them.

 

Technical SEO issues at play?

Sometimes you might have hired the best copywriter on the planet- let’s say his name is Bob.

Bob’s done a good job, well done Bob.

However, what could be holding Bob’s work back is a CMS and web design team that are duplicating, firing redirects all over the place like an out-of-control Nerf gun, and just not using 301s as they should.

Bob’s work might be good, but Bob’s still getting held back by technical SEO issues.

 

Rather than delete, improve, and refine

We have seen so many “hot-shot” agencies say, “content prune,” which is basically marketing-speak for cutting out a chunk of the pages because they can’t be bothered to improve them.

However, we would encourage you to improve the overall quality score by improving pages first.

Don’t delete, improve.

It’s like car restoration: there’s no point in throwing the whole car away if you can salvage and improve it by welding and cutting out rusted sections.

This is the same as content marketing. Don’t just hold your finger down on the delete button; that’s lazy. Improve, refine and monitor to see if your efforts are paying off.

 

On-page SEO and sprinkle the page with SEO goodness

You might have used Google Analytics to export a ton of pages that aren’t getting any organic traffic to Excel.

Then it’s a matter of applying good on-page SEO and thinking about website structure and hierarchy. Coming up with a plan of how pages interlink, how link juice is spread, and how technical SEO issues, such as 301 redirects, are used.

Cropping out redirect loops, the list goes on and on.

 

Hire the best

If you are looking for a U.K.-based SEO agency, look no further than Walsh & Partners.