Finding and fixing thin and duplicate content on your website
How to spot thin and duplicate pages, then choose between improving, merging, canonicalising or noindexing them, including filter and tracking parameter URLs.
4 min read
A warehousing company in Bhiwandi has one page called 'Our Services'. It covers bonded warehousing, e-commerce fulfilment, cross-docking and pallet storage in a paragraph each, followed by a contact form. A brand manager looking for a fulfilment partner lands on it, scrolls past customs bonds and leaves. Google has the same difficulty. It cannot tell which search the page should answer, so it answers none of them well.
Start from the keywords you have already chosen for your services; our post on picking keywords by intent and value covers that step. The job here is narrower: give each chosen keyword one page, and make sure no two pages compete for the same buyer.
Bonded warehousing is bought by importers who want to defer customs duty until goods are cleared for sale. E-commerce fulfilment is bought by online brands who need pick, pack, dispatch and returns. The buyers, questions and objections differ, so the pages should too.
A service page that tries to sell everything ends up ranking for nothing and persuading no one.
Buyers scan a service page for answers in a fairly predictable order. Build the page in that order and most of the on-page SEO takes care of itself.
Write subheadings as the questions buyers ask. 'How returns are handled' helps more than 'Our Approach'. Do not repeat the main phrase in every paragraph. Search engines understand related wording, and readers notice keyword stuffing long before it helps anything.
Every service page claims reliability. A buyer comparing fulfilment partners wants evidence that you have done this particular job before, specific enough to verify.
Proof also answers a question in Google's own guidance on helpful content: does the page show first-hand experience?
FAQs are for the buyer who is nearly convinced. Collect real questions from sales calls, enquiry emails and lost deals. Answer each in a short paragraph that someone could forward to their manager, and put the direct answer first, as in 'Yes, we take clients on three-month contracts'.
Keep answers visible on the page, not inside a PDF, and update them when your terms change. FAQPage structured data does no harm, but do not plan around FAQ rich results. Google shows them for very few sites, mainly well-known government and health sources. The value is in the answer, not the markup.
Nobody chooses a fulfilment partner by clicking 'Buy now'. They want to talk, compare or get a quote. The call to action should suit that stage.
Review those numbers after a month. A page with steady visits and no enquiries has a proof or call-to-action problem, not a ranking problem.
Ask your sales team which questions come up on nearly every call about your main service, and answer each one in a short FAQ on that page this week.
Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.
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