In marketing circles, “thin content” is content that provides little or no value to an audience. It doesn’t match search intent or help people complete a task.
While some marketers only think thin content is for B2C and other direct-to-consumer (DTC) content, it can affect B2B content too.
What Makes Content “Thin”?
Thin content generally refers to web pages, posts, and other content materials that:
- Have low word counts
- Have little original content
- Offer no unique insights
- Are created solely to rank for specific keywords
- Are written by guests who lack expertise, originality, or relevance to the site’s audience
- Are fully AI-generated
Thin content violates Google’s spam policies and can significantly negatively impact the SEO of a site.
Why Thin Content Hurts a Site’s SEO
Thin content negatively impacts a site’s SEO because most search engines use the E-E-A-T concept to rank search results. That’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google uses it to help search raters evaluate whether the served content provides helpful, relevant information. Thin content isn’t helpful or relevant, so it won’t be rated highly by anyone and falls down the SERPs quickly.
Plus, thin content:
- Offers a bad user experience (UX) because it fails to engage visitors. That signals to search engines that the content isn’t useful.
- Is often poorly organized and lacks good structure, making it hard for users to find the information they want.
Search engines will penalize those sites and web pages automatically through search algorithm updates and may even issue a manual penalty if it’s particularly bad.
That’s why you should help your B2B clients get rid of thin content.
Examples of B2B Thin Content
Here are a few examples of thin content your B2B clients might have published.
Content That’s Not Helpful
Any content they’ve published that lacks depth and usefulness and fails to go deep enough into the topic is a candidate for rewriting or elimination.
For example, a product page that only outlines the product or service’s features without providing details on specifications, how it aligns with business goals, and how to purchase the product is thin.
Poorly Written or Designed Content
Many B2B companies have moved to fully AI-generated content, which reminds us of the old days of content mills and keyword-stuffed content. People don’t like this content because it’s hard to read, the information might be rehashed or copied from other sites, and it may be laid out in a hard-to-consume format (think no headings and giant blocks of text).
Scraped or Copied Content
This may not apply to an entire B2B website, but it may affect any of their news and press release pages or if they aggregate information from other sources. Copying and pasting content directly from another source is a signal to search engines that the content isn’t original, and they’ll rank the one who published it first higher.
“Busy” Web Pages
Web pages with many boxes, menus, forms, and ads create a poor user experience (UX). The visual noise overwhelms site visitors and distracts them from the content, causing them to bounce quickly from the page. Google recognizes positive UX and penalizes those that overload their pages.
How to Fix Thin B2B Content
The best way to fix the content is to enrich it with relevant, valuable information and give it a polish so it’s easily consumed. Here’s how you can help your B2B clients “thicken” up their thin content.
- Find out which pages are ranked and unranked with a site audit tool like Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog. Make a list of the unranked ones.
- Find out which pages have good traffic, but high bounce rates or low average time spent on the page. These may or may not be the same as the unranked pages you noticed earlier. Add them to the list.
- Take note of any page (ranked/unranked) with a drop in traffic that hasn’t rebounded. For example, most pages typically drop after a Google algorithm update; those that don’t rebound may have thin content on them. Add them to the list.
- Read through the unranked pages to see if there are any obvious problems (poorly written content, outdated or obsolete topics, copied content, and duplicate and pseudo-duplicate content).
At this stage, you should have a list of pages that need to be updated or deleted. Start by deleting the ones that are no longer relevant. Next, add “noindex” tags to pages you don’t want to be indexed for search, such as category pages. Add canonical tags to any that you want to be indexed, but you want to signal to Google that it’s intentional. The canonical tag points from the alternate, duplicate page to the preferred page.
This next phase will take a while but will be worth it for your clients.
- Make a list of the pages to update and what’s to be done (complete rewrite, refresh stats/quotes, combine with other content, etc.).
- Prioritize the content for revisions.
- Work through the list.
When it comes to rewriting or refreshing a piece of content, that means:
- Expanding on the topic.
- Answering user intent.
- Updating outdated information.
- Incorporating visuals.
- Combining it with another thin piece of content to create something more useful and authoritative.
- Refocusing the content with updated keywords.
- Repurposing the content into a new format (with updated content, visuals, etc.).
A Note on AI-Generated Content
If your client insists on using 100% AI-generated content (which I sincerely hope they aren’t), advise them to at least conduct a human edit it before it’s published. This will help you identify any “thinness,” ensure it meets your client’s brand and messaging guidelines, and help avoid any search engine penalties.
Help Your B2B Clients Find and Fix Thin Content on Their Websites
Thin content can be a big problem for B2B websites, no matter how many pages it has. All pages should be useful, relevant, and valuable to site visitors as they’re looking for answers to their questions. Search engines note this and will rank the site higher if it meets those criteria.
Helping your B2B clients identify and fix thin content on their websites is another way you can offer value to them. Do it regularly and you’ve got a nice retainer project for your bottom line. Your clients stay high on the search engine results pages, and you’ve got steady work. Win-win.
