How many pages should be on landscapers website

[vadimmarusin10]

Hi Guys,

We have a good website strong onsite and offsite seo. A year ago, we had a 15 pages website for all main keywords we needed and we were on top 3 for most of these keywords in google. We were happy but we wanted more..

So we created lots of unique content targeting long tail keywords and created 100 more pages for the website.  In next 4-5 months we lost positions for almost all our main keywords but got lots of longtails SERPs. Trafiic grew but the quality and the conversion rate shrinked.

Everybody keep saying that it doesn't matter how many pages you have on the website as long as content is unique and I don't think it is true. I see lots of 3-5 paged websites without any seo in top 3 results in google.

Does it mean that if I delete all these 100 pages that I created I will have more chances to get my main keywords SERP back?

Basically does the seo juice that you have on domain is spreading across all pages and the more pages you have the less juice every page will get?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

How closely related were the long tail pages to the head terms?  Was it like

blue widget

vs

blue widget prices

[danatanseo]

Hi Vadim,

Here is what I consider to be one of the best posts on PageRank and how it works: http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Here is a quote about the potential of increasing PageRank by increasing the number of pages on  a site:

"

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Example 5: new pages

Adding new pages to a site is an important way of increasing a site's total PageRank because each new page will add an average of 1 to the total. Once the new pages have been added, their new PageRank can be channeled to the important pages. We'll use the calculator to demonstrate these.

Let's add 3 new pages to Example 3 [<a>view</a>]. Three new pages but they don't do anything for us yet. The small increase in the Total, and the new pages' 0.15, are unrealistic as we shall see. So let's link them into the site.

Link each of the new pages to the important page, page A [<a>view</a>]. Notice that the Total PageRank has doubled, from 3 (without the new pages) to 6. Notice also that page A's PageRank has almost doubled.

There is one thing wrong with this model. The new pages are orphans. They wouldn't get into Google's index, so they wouldn't add any PageRank to the site and they wouldn't pass any PageRank to page A. They each need to be linked to from at least one other page. If page A is the important page, the best page to put the links on is, surprisingly, page A [<a>view</a>]. You can play around with the links but, from page A's point of view, there isn't a better place for them.

It is not a good idea for one page to link to a large number of pages so, if you are adding many new pages, spread the links around. The chances are that there is more than one important page in a site, so it is usually suitable to spread the links to and from the new pages. You can use the calculator to experiment with mini-models of a site to find the best links that produce the best results for its important pages."

So you see, it could be that those additional pages have potential to really help your site, but perhaps they aren't optimized in terms of the internal linking structure. Before deleting a bunch of content you worked hard to create, I would take a look at how those new pages are being linked to and what pages they are linking to. Study the internal architecture and you will most likely find your answer.

Long answer, I know, but I hope it helps!

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[Lumina]

Hi Vadim,

As a general rule, don't create content for the sake of having it - create content (this includes pages) that are useful to customers or prospective customers. If you need 1,000 pages to convey all of that useful information, then go for it! But odds are you don't. Think of it this way: if you were a prospective customer and came to your website, which pages would you actually want to read?

Another note: the more pages you have, the higher the chances you have of there being mistakes - be it in the content, the code/development/etc. This doesn't mean you should have as few pages as possible, but it does mean that you need to weigh time spent doing maintenance against payout.

One last thought - pages may end up actually competing with one another for the same keyword(s). So sometimes it's better to have a few cleverly put-together pages that rank high than a lot of pages that rank moderately.

If you want an extremely simple answer (and I hope you don't!): I'd say anywhere from 10-30 pages is perfect for a small or medium business that has a specific set of services and well-crafted pages/content.

[vadimmarusin10]

No, the main keywords were like seattle landscaping and long tail like retaining walls seattle

[vadimmarusin10]

Thank you for the answer.

I have another website with 28000 unique pages that all linked to home page. My home page optimised for one keyword but I can't get it in top even though my competitors are way smaller and they are in top with almost no seo.. On the other hand I have looooots of traffic on internal pages, but internal pages only.