Like what we’ve said countless times on all our stories here, the little tiny details that make up the entirety of the site and your campaign overall can have a very significant effect. These little choices — like not securing your domain or not being able to choose the correct set of keywords– can immediately set your performance in fire. But in a really bad way.
The mere fact of having not enough or having too many pages can also have a palpable effect. Let’s check out the little details:
Is Less Good?
In a lot of other things, yes, this is very much true: salt on your omelette, weight in your race car, wild colours in your website etc. But for the pages of your website, this can be detrimental.
Yes, there are websites out there that literally have only one page, but you have to step back and check: “are they ranking well?” “Do you even see them on the 1st or 2nd page?” “Are they being indexed even?” Well, they can be, but the thing that happens here is that the content of all those different services gets all mixed up. Over specialised things never live long on SERPS. The ones that do make it end up slithering down the depths of the search results.
Having just one page for a site is okay; it lets your customers go over your whole site all at once. But the problem here is that, like I said, the whole thing is just over packaged and over specialised.
But, if for example, you only have just one service or one product focus, this can be done. Although the performance won’t be as good as those websites that have a lot more pages. It’s like being a simple worm in an environment that’s littered with animals with a lot of hands and feet. And speaking of which…
The More The Merrier?
More character references on a Steven Spielberg CGI film? Yes, please! More pages on a website, it still depends.
If you have a site that sells a lot of different products like e-commerce websites, you sort of really need to have a lot of pages. Seriously. But if not and you have a lot of unnecessary pages, you need to clean up some of it.
If your site has too many pages and most of it isn’t useful, Google will notice this and you can still get into a lot of trouble. Not because there’s an update for it or anything like that, but it’s more of Google knows that people hate going to those extra pages because it’s not really useful.
Always be mindful of that bounce rate, my friend.
Other versions of this problem is when your pages have to jump and redirect too many times. Not only does that add up, but because of all the redirections, the load time slows down. Another User Experience factor you need to be careful with.
Indexing
When it comes to having your pages indexed, there are also a few interesting reactions to these different kinds of set up:
For websites that have a few pages, they still get along fine, even those that got just one page. The problem happens when the effects of the competition takes effect.
For sure, your competitors will have more pages. And more pages that can tackle one theme or topic at a time and can, therefore, cover more ground. One against ten is always a bad place to be in. Even in SEO.
On the other hand, those that have a lot of pages have a lot more chances to cover ground. This can help in ranking to more keyword themes, more topics– they can be found online better.
Mostly because there’s so many of them that they can be seen almost everywhere. The problem there, however, is if those pages are useful or redirects multiple times, long enough to bore out the potential visitor.
Yes, these pages can come up for a wider group of keywords in your niche, but ranking them if it’s too much will also be a hard thing to do.
Content & Keyword Targeting
If you have very few pages, you won’t have enough space to showcase your content. Imagine trying to utilise ten different services in a website with only one page. Or even five… Let’s be realistic.
With one page, you can’t even use all those keywords on the title and meta descriptions.
If you have a site that’s got too many pages, the problem becomes more of that spammy vibe. More so, when there’s no proper Rel Canonicalization on those pages. The good thing here is that you have a lot of space to create content for all your keywords.
The answer, therefore, is to have a moderate amount of pages. Go get yourself the basic stuff. You can never go wrong with that.
An About Us, Contact Us and Services page can do a lot of magic for your performance. Lastly once again, a blog section is a good way to “add more pages” on your site and cover more ground. The more pages on your site that talks about certain keywords and topics, the more chances you get to rank on these terms and keywords.
