Having relevant and high-quality content is crucial for achieving success in local SEO. But what if your website has empty pages? How do these impact your optimisation efforts?
Empty pages do hurt your local SEO. When your site has too many pages that lack information and value, users tend to leave and search for alternatives. Likewise, empty pages can confuse search engines, leading to fluctuations in rankings.
In a competitive service business industry, the last thing you want is to leave SEO issues unaddressed. So, in this guide, we’ll help you navigate the world of empty website pages and learn how to manage them effectively in 3 parts.
Part 1: Understanding Empty Website Pages
From the term itself, empty pages contain minimal to zero content. They lack unique or substantive text, images, or multimedia components that give value to readers.
There are several examples of empty pages. Some of the most common are:
- Under-construction pages. These can be used during website development or when pages are down for redesign.
- Placeholder pages. These are inaccessible links on your navigation menu used to organise similar pages. For example, in an electrical service website, “Services” is a placeholder containing individual pages for lighting, smoke alarms, and emergency work.
- Pages with boilerplate elements. Boilerplates are standard or templated text that you can use repeatedly on several pages without changing the original structure. Corporations, law firms, and medical institutions often place these at the end of published documents or press releases. These work like an About Us and Contact section, providing the background and relevance of a company to released content.
Impact on Local SEO
As empty pages provide little to no value to visitors or readers, they can significantly affect your local SEO efforts and progress through the following:
- Poor user experience. Visitors likely leave a site with several empty pages, resulting in high bounce rates. Search engines interpret this as a signal that your page is not helpful. In turn, the ranking of the page or the entire website plummets.
- Waste of crawl budget. Empty pages divert search engine bots from crawling your new and updated pages. When you waste crawl time, you also delay the indexing of valuable content, affecting your local SEO performance.
- Lower domain authority. Your index becomes inflated as search engines crawl several empty pages on your site. A bloated index of low-quality pages can lower your domain authority, making your website less credible and visible online.
- Weaker internal link structure. Inbound links are vital to your local SEO as these make your site easy to navigate. They also help search engines understand your site structure, giving you better rankings. However, when you have too many empty or dead-end pages, you also hinder the smooth internal linking flow within your website, which affects its efficacy.
Numerous Australian businesses are vying for top-ranking positions. So, it’s no good if empty pages are affecting your website and local SEO performance.
To set your business apart and surpass the competition, you should address every aspect of local SEO on your website, including empty pages and those with thin content.
Part 2: When Empty Pages Become a Local SEO Drag
Another way to understand empty pages is to know the concept of thin content. This on-page content gives no value to users.
You’ll notice two things when you look at pages with thin content. One is they usually have a low word count. Second, they are often poorly written.
However, there are other ways to identify thin content, including:
- duplicate content
- stolen content from other websites
- misleading content that manipulates or scams users
- web content that lacks depth or usefulness to the user’s query
- pages with too many intrusive ads and pop-ups
- too many blog tag pages or empty product and category pages
All these examples lead to one result: poor user experience. When readers encounter thin content, you only encourage them to leave your site.
Worse, you drive potential customers or followers away, pushing them to find business elsewhere.
With too many shallow pages and content on your site, you reduce your opportunity to rank well and outperform competitors.
Part 3: What to Do with Empty Pages
Finding and correcting empty pages on your website is vital to your local SEO strategy. Here are a few suggestions on how to do this.
1. Repurpose or Redirect
If an empty page has similar content somewhere on your site, consider applying a 301 redirect. This action guides users and search engines to a more helpful page while preserving your link equity.
Another solution is to evaluate the empty page and find ways to enhance it. Repurpose outdated content by adding more information and relevant keywords for better visibility. Also, be sure to align your updated content with search intent.
2. Unpublish and Plan for the Future
If you do not want to remove an empty page and cannot enhance it now, consider unpublishing it.
Adding a no-index tag also excludes the page during indexing. That way, you do not waste crawl time and redirect the bots to your more important pages.
When ready, you can always republish an empty page with content more aligned with your future service offerings and local SEO strategy.
3. Create a Coming Soon Page
Turning an empty page into a teaser for what’s to come on your site is an effective way to pique interest or attract potential customers.
When you choose this route, add target keywords to your coming soon page copy. Keep it catchy, bright, and engaging. Add relevant links to other internal pages or your social media accounts.
A call-to-action button asking the reader to subscribe to your newsletter for updates is also a good add-on. Don’t forget to make the page responsive for all device types.
Conclusion
Empty pages can bring your local SEO progress down. It negatively affects user experience, wastes crawl budget, reduces your domain authority, and weakens your internal link structure.
Ultimately, these issues make your visitors less interested and engaged on your site, affecting traffic and conversion.
However, you can mitigate the risks by repurposing thin content, redirecting empty pages, unpublishing them for future use, or utilising coming soon pages.
Aside from the pointers in this guide, we recommend doing a regular site audit so you can spot and address issues promptly.
SEO is here to stay and will continue to evolve, after all. So, it’s best to implement practices that keep you publishing valuable pages and content to your audience.
