Can You Have Too Much Web Content?
February 9th, 2009 // 11:24 am @ Fox
Time and again it is instilled upon us that ‘content is king’ when it comes to a website. The experts all say to write as much copy as you can on your product or service, add a blog, write reviews, FAQ’s, articles and so on. Is it possible to have too much content?
The benefits of having a ton of copy on your website include:
- Plenty of information for customers researching your product or service
- A full and comprehensive site seen as an authority
- Loads of long-tail keywords or phrases for people searching
- The more opportunities for people wishing to link to one of the pages
There is a big ‘however’ here. HOWEVER, there are two ways that you can have too much content.
- If the content is not meaningful, there is no point in having lots of content. Meaningless dribble will not give customers much information on your product or service or encourage people to link to it. It is very easy to write a few hundred words on a particular topic, but boring and trivial will result in a high bounce rate.
The content needs to be informative, compelling and easy to read. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience and think about what information they need, or what copy would interest them.
- It is not recommended to have too much copy on one page, particularly if it is just massive blocks of text. This is not how people read online. Many websites, particularly corporate sites, make the mistake of treating the online environment in the same way as the offline environment. Where offline you can read a book, magazine or article with lots of block paragraphs, online it does not work this way.
Online readers tend to scan web pages looking for something that will attract their interest. The use of headings, bolded text, bullet points, images, links and plenty of white space is much easier to read than just text.
It is fine to have a few hundred words per page providing it is broken up into easy to read and manageable chunks.