…is trying to cram too many sub-topics into one post.
Here’s an example from a great septic pumping company website —
Understanding Hydro Jetting: Powerful Solution for Stubborn Blockages
First things first: it’s a long (7K words) and detailed post, and the company has definitely outdone 90% of local business blogs out there. Some fragments are repeating but that’s nothing a bit of editing can’t fix.
However, that’s also where it gets somewhat problematic: there are too many sub-topics that could’ve been separate posts and performed better.
If you go through the post you can see several distinct themes in it:
- What is hydro jetting and how does it work
- Hydro jetting pros, cons, and alternatives
- Sewer pipe maintenance
- Hydro jetting vs snaking
- Hydro jetting vs chemical cleaning
- Hydro jetting for different types of pipes (age, materials, shapes, length, etc.)
- Hydro jetting costs and ways to save on the procedure
- Additional services that go well with hydro jetting
- DIY hydro jetting — reasons to stay away
Each of these topics deserves a separate blog post! And if we run keyword research there is definitely enough search volume to create a separate landing page for each of the respective keyword groups.
Google values page relevance very much, and dedicating each post to a specific topic covered A to Z is the best way to produce preforming content.
On the other hand, touching upon too many subjects dilutes the relevance of your post and Google is essentially confused as to what exactly it is about. When that happens your post gets suppressed and other, more relevant content gets displayed in search results instead.
To recap, these are the proven benefits of producing short, focused, and topically tight blog posts:
- higher relevance (better for SEO)
- you have more content to post frequently and consistently
- interlinking opportunities (power up your service pages)
That’s also why FAQ pages are also horrible for your local business SEO efforts. Even worse if you have huge FAQ sections on your service pages — they dilute your topical tightness more than anything.
Originally published on our Medium blog