Thin Content Diagnosis, Strategy and Creation SOP

This document is designed to give content and a clear understanding of the importance of identifying and fixing thin content issues to support organic growth.

What Is Thin Content?

For the sake of simplicity, the definition of thin content:

  • Content that has a low word count (pages with little to no content on them, usually, just a paragraph or two)
  • Content that is already repeated throughout the site (internal duplicate content)

The most important thing here is to remember that both of the above become an issue ONLY on a large scale. If you have one or two pages on your website with little content, there’s nothing to worry about. If 70% of your site pages have less than 300 words, it must be the reason why you cannot get it to appear in the top 10 of Google.

Another important thing about a large amount of thin content on your site is that it may drag your higher-quality pages down too. To put it simply, if 30% of your site pages are well-written well-researched long-form content, they may still have trouble ranking because of those 70% of thin pages.

Finally, thin content usually means less internal links exist naturally on the site. Internal links are a huge ranking factor, so it’s important that we identify where content is needed at scale so that we can leverage more internal links within the content.

How to Identify Thin Content on Your Site

{SEO MANAGER TO COMPLETE}

Resources that you’ll need before you begin:

  • A Screaming Frog licence – This will be used to crawl all the URLs on the website and extract all of the content from each page.
  • Thin Content Audit Template (MAKE A COPY) – To export the raw crawl data into and organise/present all pages classified as having thin content.

Step 1 – Configuring Crawl Settings

Before running a crawl on the whole domain, we first need to specify a few instructions to Screaming Frog in order to pull out word count data for each page.

Screaming Frog has a default “word count” metric, but this metric takes into account every single word on the page (including words in the navigation/footer), so it’s not the best method to judge word count on individual pages.

The way to combat this is by pulling out each content block on the page individually and measuring how many words are contained in each content block.

To do this, open up Screaming Frog and navigate to the very top menu bar where you’ll find Configuration > Custom > Extraction.

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Here’s where we’ll be specifying to Screaming Frog which elements we want to pull out of each page.

Let’s look at (client)

On-Site Diagnostics:

  1. Crawl Site

How to fix Thin Content 

  1. Logging Content – All pages with thin content will be identified and logged in the thin content template found here
  2. Content populated will be found in the “current” tab

Content

  1. After completion of the thin content audit, keyword and FAQ research by the SEO team this is then passed to the content team.
  2. Content team will work through the document writing the copy with the identified KW to a quality standard. Delivered by a date agreed with the SEO team and the client
  3. Content team will then send the content over to the client for approval.
  4. Once approved this will be passed back to the SEO team for upload and optimisation.
  5. Once uploaded, seo team notify the client for sign off.