For many years the industry has been repeatedly bashed over the head with an old adage… “Content is King”. Recently we have been working with an eCommerce company who specialises in Performance Car Parts, they have a website built on Magento and had recently redeveloped their website ready for 2017. However, as soon as the site had switch to the new design their rankings plummeted.

Anybody who has been an SEO for a while will know there are various reasons that may cause this, one of the most common being Old URL’s not being 301 redirected to their new versions, and Google not having their new site structure indexed. However, for the most part these redirects were in place in this particular example. Upon closer inspection (using the Wayback Machine to view their old site design) the problem had become obvious, the new website was totally devoid of written content!

Why Content Is Needed

Simply put, a website or webpage without written content will struggle to rank for any related keywords in a modern search engine. Google uses content to understand the “topic” of a webpage, along with page headings, meta data and title tags. Well written content helps Google determine whether or not a page matches the user’s search query and helps it understand the topical relevance of a given page.

Well written content also helps engage users and keep them on your website longer, which can lead to higher conversion rates, leads generated and sales made, bingo!

Word Count

Word count is an important factor when considering your SEO. If you have a page with very little wording you will struggle to see this one rankings as well, its marginally better than a page with zero content. Google also looks at the volume of words on the page, if it is deemed to be too low or “thin” Google may start penalising the website as part of its Panda Algorithm.

So What Happened After Adding Content

One of the first things we did for our client was increase the amount of content on their website pages, as soon as Google re-indexed this new content rankings started to return along with traffic to the site, in a really short space of time.

Summary

If your pages and website have dropped in traffic, it may be related to the written content on your pages. If the word count is low or there is little to no written wording on the page, try expanding the content, including your target keywords and variations of these targets and you should see some improvements in traffic and rankings.

These improvements above were seen without any SEO Link building, they were achieved by adding keyword targets to the META Data, Title Tags and by adding sufficient written content to the pages.