How can I provide titles and descriptive text for our list of USPs on the same page optimized both for usability and SEO

[Benni]

I am rebuilding our website together with an agency and I am stuck with the following problem:

We have a page which will provide the visitor with a quick and convincing impression why he should chose our enterprise. On this page we want to show our USPs (Unique Selling Points) each with a title and a short description. Now my preferred way of presenting those USPs would be of a list of the titles (which permits to see all USPs without having to read a lot of text) where each title can be clicked to expand the description (in case you want to know more about this specific USP) and if you click on another title the previously clicked title description will collapse and the new description expand and so on (similar to this page: http://www.berlin-city-immobilien.de/38.html - I'm talking about the list in the middle of the page starting with the headline "Dabei profitieren Sie von folgenden Vorteilen"). Since I also want to use these descriptions as on page SEO-texts I checked whether Google might not index or at least value "click to expand content" less than plain text in the body of the page and I stumbled over this article: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hidden-tab-content-seo-19489.html. According to this article Google will definitely discount the descriptions on my page.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem? Either by suggesting a different way to show titles and descriptions on the page or maybe by suggesting a workaround so Google will not treat the descriptions as "click to expand text".

Thank you already in advance for your input.
Ben

[rjonesx. 0]

This is a question that is getting a lot more attention lately. You have two choices...

1. Accept the reality that Google doesn't want to rank you for content that is hidden...
In this case, I would recommend starting with the list of your USPs at the top, maybe each with 1 sentence below explaining (like a headline and a tagline). Below that, repeat the headlines but each with a much longer description of text. Make the first listings links to the anchored headlines below, so if you click on the 1st USP, you are taken to the full description of it below. Then use a "return to top" anchor to bring you back to the list. This would allow you to get your USPs front-and-center and still get the content on the page.

2. Or try and get around it.
Start with the content showing and then hide it with some JS event like a scroll, mouseover, timed event, etc.

In the end, I would recommend finding a way to accomplish #1 so you don't worry about losing ill-gotten gains by tricking Google.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Well, in the same article you are referring to, is this text:

Amazon use to use a lot of tabs but now they seem to output most of the content directly on the page, making the user scroll and scroll to see the content. _Google's own help documents does use click to expand but only to see the questions. _

Also there was this video from Matt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpK1VGJN4XY

I understand that a lot of this content contradicts each other etc, but I'd look at this problem like this: it's not a secret at all that Google puts (or at least states that they put) User Experience first. So, Look at your page and see if users, after they land on it, would be happy. If everything makes sense from User point of view. If "expand" buttons are large enough and portrait that by clicking on them you'd expand content etc.

Also, as Matt said, is there 8 pages of content hidden and being displayed after you click "expand" and ruining your day?

I believe that as long as it looks good, makes sense to user and is good content, there shouldn't be any problems. The only workaround i see is instead of expandable content, to have simply links to other pages. I've seen both scenarios work.

Hope this helps.

[Benni]

First of all thank you both for taking the time to answer my question.

@Russ

I also was hesitating whether I could display the text first and then collapse it with some JS but I also read somewhere that Google is or will be analyzing JS in the future and of course this could lead to a penalty if not now than somewhere in the future. So I think I will follow your advice to stick with your first suggestion.

As to your first suggestion: In this case the user has to click more so this is a slight limitation when it comes to usability but I guess to some extend I have to accept a compromise. Do you think it is a problem if content (in that case headline and teaser) is repeated on the same page?

@ Dimitrii

Well what Matt is saying is that they won't count it as some spam and penalize the website. But he does not say anything about how the click to expand content is weighted.

The solution with the different pages will not work in my case as I need all descriptions on one page for SEO and it is also a slight limitation to usability as the user has to keep on switching between the pages.