On Page Optimisation - Do I stick or twist?

[AshShep1]

Hi Guys

My site was launched in June 2013, with approx 6 pages for each section eg, funeral planning, annuities, insurance etc - we have not achieved page 1 in SERPs but many page 2's & 3's.

On average each page has between 200 to 300 words, with images, using the funeral planning section as an example the page headers are:

• funeral planning (introduces what it is eg prepaid funeral plans, writing a Will, inheritance tax planning)
• funeral plans (what is a prepaid funeral plan & the benefits)
• why buy a funeral plan (reasons to buy)
• funeral costs (rising costs of funerals & plans)
• buying a funeral plan online (why buying online is easier than visiting the funeral directors)
• compare funeral plans (compare prepaid funeral plan providers options)

We decided at the outset to go for more pages rather than 1 or 2 pages with 600 to 1000 words on as we thought from a customer experience perspective that the information would be easier to see & with an older audience the headers would educate them & make them more confident to buy online. And clustering the pages & linking them together we thought google would recognise this!

However, from everything i have recently read we may achieve better SERPs if we combine pages, to remove the obvious "funeral plan" keyword overlap & longer pages may achieve better "topic" value with google (as per Rands recent WBF)?

So we are at a crossroads - do we give it longer for the original plan & hope that we pop up in SERPs page 1 or bite the bullet, create one page per section/topic & find a way to display the content in user friendly way?

The latter is of course major surgery to the site, but if there is sufficient long term value I will swallow hard & do it!

Thoughts?

Ash

[Chris.Menke]

Hey Ash,

The thing about longer page lengths is not so much that they have more words per se, as much as it is that a 1000 word page may contain a _broader vocabulary _as compared to a shorter page.  However, I can give you countless examples where a 300 word page outranks a 2000 word page simply by virtue of the quality of the writing. So, even though everyone seems to be all hung up on "more words are better" you're better off thinking about how well do you understand your audience's questions and how thoroughly have you answered them.

Ultimately, however, ranking is not just about the words on the page, but about your audience's experience with your content--are they clicking through, are they spending time, are they sharing.  In order to push you up in the rankings, Google wants to see that your content is important to your audience and its vocabulary is only part of that equation.  I might recommend Rand's  content manifesto for some inspiration on how to move forward with your site's content.  I think what you've described so far is a good start but there is an entire universe of directions you can take it and now may be a good time to start looking at the bigger picture.

[AshShep1]

HI Chris thanks for your thoughts.

Just watched the Vid, which is great & we will review our content.

Of course its chicken & egg, without volume visitors, as we arent on Page1, its difficult to fully understand customer behaviour with regards sharing etc.

Whilst i have also seen short & long pages work, I havent any experience or checked the results of when on the same site they have keywords that overlap & are inter-related, such as the example i gave.

For example, funeral planning will also show search results for funeral plans & yet have different volumes of searches when checking in Adwords Keyword Planner, so i want to target both, and currently i have them on differing pages - so is this the right strategy?

I know that off page factors will also effect my overall ranking but im keen to get the optimum on page structure.

What do you think?

Ash