Heading Tags & Content Count

[BeckyKey]

Hi everyone

I am looking into this page on our site http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/sack-trucks

Just comparing it against competitors in SEMRush, the tool shows a wordcount of this page for over 4089 words, compared with http://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-Green-General-Purpose-Sack-Truck-200kg/p/500302 which only has 2658 - it has a lot more written content than our page - where is this word count coming from?

Also looking at the same page on our site Woorank suggests we have the word 'sack truck' in the h1 and title too many times - it's only there once, but its this showing because its an exact match keyword?

I'm just wondering if there is something wrong with the html or how the page is being crawed?

[Mobilio]

TL;DR - word count of WHAT?

Different tools have different metrics. Let's bust myth of HTML wordcounts!

So first open both pages and view their sources. Key have 9575 lines and Wickes is just 1854. Seems that one of page is little bit large. Let's try this with tool:
http://www.seoreviewtools.com/bulk-web-page-word-count-checker/
just paste both links, solve captcha and push button. And you will see that Key is with more keywords. Now let's try with tool #2:
http://textmechanic.com/text-tools/basic-text-tools/count-characters-words-lines/
just go in Key (not in page source, just view page in browser), select all, copy, go in tool #2 and paste. Make same check with Wickes.

Why this happens? Because different methodology of calculation. First tool go in HTML and grab everything in as words for calculation with stripped HTML tags, special symbols, etc. He show us number X and we are agreed that this IS correct number. In second tool you paste (BTW - you can make same calculation with Word, just go in Paste Special and paste as TEXT ONLY!) everything what user see and he show you correct number of words like Y.

So due different methodology why X is different than Y? Because you may have some ajax code, invisible layouts, and/or other HTML mess. For example in Key site i can clearly see DIV with display:none with heavy content. And this happens 61 times!

Now i hope that this give you answer why X and Y are different and both are correct at same time. Because counting methodology is different.

[DonnaDuncan]

Your HTML looks fine.

I used screaming frog to scan both pages. As Peter Nikolow says, different tools have different ways of coming up with word counts. Screaming frog says your page has 3910 words and your competitor (wickes), 3714. So they're very close. I trust screaming frog. It's a popular tool among SEOs.

I also wouldn't worry about Woorank's suggestion that you have the words "sack truck" too many times in the H1 and title tag. You're fine there too, following best practices.

Why are you asking these questions? Are you trying to figure out why wickes is outranking you? If that's the case, I suggest you try a side-by-side comparison using the keyword difficulty tool here on Moz.

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you I have tried the Keyword Difficulty tool

Yes I was just look at the top ranking sites in Google to see what they were doing differently

Thanks!

[BeckyKey]

Thank you Peter!

I'll take a look at those links you sent me. Is the use of display none a bad thing if used over 61 times?

[Mobilio]

It's bad even if you use once. This could be cloaking technique.

[BeckyKey]

Yes, I am not great at reading html, I know it is bad for hiding written content.

Does this apply if it looks to be hiding anything?

[Mobilio]

Well there are many ways to hide something in content. But why you hiding it since user can't see it? Isn't better to make this in

[BeckyKey]

It's something I'll talk to the developers about, thank you