How Many Words To Make Content 'unique?'

[Sandicliffe]

Hi All,

I'm currently working on creating a variety of new pages for my website.

These pages are based upon different keyword searches for cars, for example used BMW in London, Used BMW in Edinburgh and many many more similar kinds of variations. I'm writing some content for each page so that they're completely unique to each other (the cars displayed on each page will also be different so this would not be duplicated either).

My question is really, how much content do you think that I'll need on each page? or what is optimal? What would be the minimum you might need?

Thank for your help!

[CommT]

This totally depends on too many variables for me to say (I think anyway).

Personally, I wouldn't overwhelm your visitors with too much wordy text - they're interested in test driving your cars and possibly buying one, NOT reading a load of gumph on the cars. Either they like the cars or they don't, obviously you need to include the benefits and features of each vehicle, but really I wouldn't write huge volumes of text because that'll put people off.

[ProductPearson]

General rule of thumb is to ensure that a minimum of 20% content on your page is 100% unique and can not be found on any other page on your website, nor any other page on the web.

Of course, the more percent of unique content you can bring onto the page, the more likely you will be able to rank for nice effective quality content - especially if it is longform.

[Sandicliffe]

HI There,

Thank you for your response.

THe purpose of the text is not as such to sell the car to the user (in this instance), we do have text on each individual car about its perks, technical specs etc. This page is simply for displaying lists of cars, with the content only really needing to introduce the cars as to appease search engines.

So essentially the content is for the search engines benefit in the sense that it will differentiate it from other pages and is hopefully therefore more likely to get indexed and bring us traffic for the long tail keywords that are being targeted.

Lots of content might definitely overwhelm users so really im trying to find the right balance of uniqueness and quantity!

[Sandicliffe]

Thank you for your response.

this is really helpful, so essentially 20% is the minimum, but more than this would help?

[ProductPearson]

Pretty much. This from research and statistics that I have read over the past years, but of course it is just an estimate based on different variables.

For more info, Moz did actually do a a great blog post which should help answer your question:

http://moz.com/blog/how-unique-does-content-need-to-be-to-perform-well-in-search-engines-whiteboard-friday

[MoosaHemani]

The easiest and quickest answer to there is there is no word count limit but I would suggest  you to look in to your competitors, see how they are writing and what kind of content they are producing on this pages.

If mostly people are writing long content pieces then you probably have to go with more words but if they are writing short, you have a margin.

Plus you should use creativity in your content that convince potential customer to convert. Like use of images, infographics, testimonials and more will help to a greater extent.

Hope this helps!

[KeriMorgret]

Do you have dealerships in each of those locations?

Usually content written exclusively for the search engines and not for users is not the best type of content.

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning.

I am going to come at this from a slightly different viewpoint. There is a difference between rewriting an article to suit your needs by adding/cutting/modifying an article to suit your website, and simply spinning an article.

I'm being slightly presumptuous simply for the sake of discussion and from personal experience cleaning up a website full of this sort of content. EGOL, a Samauri Mozzer said a long time ago on another SEO board far far away that one day search engines will rate websites on content alone, and nothing else. It seems like that statement is coming true.

The recent updates, and even dating as far back as updates like Hummingbird have all pointed toward the importance of relevant, powerful, new content. Google new EAT standards even supported that more; expertise, authoritative, and trustworthiness. In my opinion, Google is trying to emulate how a human would search for things, the days of tricking Google into thinking your website is something that it isn't are close to being over.

Right now I am cleaning up a website that has content that is different enough to satisfy Google (at least to the point of not getting manual actions), but similar enough that any person who reads it laughs. We were getting plenty of traffic, but people were leaving once the noticed the similarity in the content.

It's tough to truly advise tactics without looking at a website, and again I am not suggesting you are spinning articles, trying to pull the wool over Googles eyes. I merely bring up another point.

I have learned that getting to the top of Google really is only half the battle. You still have to convert the people once the get there. You have an opportunity here to not ONLY satisfy Google, but also convert customers. Writing unique content that not only meets the needs of Google, yet ALSO convinces someone to purchase a car, in that moment.... well that's a win win! I would suggest spending the extra time writing individual content. It will help in the long run. And in the event that Google gets even better at determining duplicate content somehow, you are protected!

If shortcuts were easy, they would just be the way. This may be faster, but in the long run, it probably won't help as much as spending the time to write them all out.

I need a new car....

[alecfwilson]

Great question, and great answers from some of the other commenters. I've struggled with this question myself in building landing pages. The 20% rule is a good one, and makes sense, especially as Google gets better at semantic search and "keywords" become a bit less important in favor of query meaning. In a perfect world (one where search engines could understand queries the way your friend would when you told him what you searched for), if you cannot come up with 20% of a landing page that is entirely unique to that page, it's not something you should be building a landing page for. In the world we operate in, it's a nice guideline. My method for long tail landing page creation is: figure out what the head keyword that this long tail landing page is most related to (if you are trying to reuse the same value prop), and just rewrite every sentence. You should alter your word choice, sentence structure, and page organization (it's a nice opportunity to test those things as well, a long tail page that does unexpectedly well may give you some insight into a better converting format). At this point, I add the unique content. For keywords that aren't different enough to have true unique content, I'll generally write a section summarizing a few of the others all together, or add a different customer testimonial. To the commenter who mentioned that you can create unique content to search engines, but humans would laugh - a landing page for long tail keywords really shouldn't be something a customer can get to without coming to it from an external referrer. The root domain shouldn't link out to both domain.com/landing-page-head-kw and domain.com/landing-page-long-tail-kw.