Screaming Cow

The SEO crawler that won't stay quiet about your site's problems.

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Content and structure

Thin content: when it is a problem

In your audit this appears as Pages with little content

The page has very little text. There is no magic number above which a page "counts", but when there is hardly any content, neither a search engine nor a person gets much out of it.

Why it matters

A search engine needs text to understand what a page is about and which queries it makes sense to show it for. With two sentences there is little to work from, and the page competes at a disadvantage against others that do answer.

That said, do not overstate it: the problem is not quantity, it is usefulness. A short contact page is fine because it does its job. Padding it with filler to reach a word count makes it worse, not better.

When to ignore it

Some pages are legitimately brief: contact, thank-you, legal notice, a category that is mostly a listing. This warning is a prompt to look at them, not an instruction to write a thousand words on each.

When it really is a problem

  • Product pages with only a name and a price, and no description of your own.
  • Hundreds of near-identical auto-generated pages (one per city, say) that change a single word.
  • Blog posts started and never finished.
  • Pages whose real content sits inside an image or a video, with no text alongside it.

How to fix it

  • Add what the person arriving actually needs to know: on a product, materials, measurements, sizes, care, delivery.
  • Answer the questions that reach you by email or phone. Those are, literally, what people are searching for.
  • If several near-empty pages cover the same thing, merge them into one good one and redirect the rest.
  • If a page has nothing to offer, consider whether it should exist at all.

Does your site have this problem?

Analyse your page for free and we will tell you which of these issues you have, and on which pages.

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Related issues

Content and structure Pages with no H1: why the main headline matters Titles and descriptions Pages with no title: what it means and how to fix it