Less is more
1st August, 2024
As businesses moved online, we broke free from the physical limits of traditional retail. Our digital stores could offer thousands, even millions of products, and our blogs could host endless articles — driving massive traffic and engagement. This was, in many ways, the golden age of scale in SEO — building vast content silos and optimising for every possible keyword.
But the game has changed. Google now prioritises quality, relevance, and user experience over sheer volume. As their systems grow smarter, they have less incentive to discover, crawl, index, or rank pages simply because they exist.
This shift poses a critical question: how can a business with a million products or thousands of articles ensure each piece of content is top-tier? Meeting Google’s EEAT standards, conducting original research, and creating differentiated content at scale is a significant challenge. And it’s not just about new content; we must also maintain and improve our existing libraries to meet evolving standards.
Resourcing such an investment — employing in-house experts across all product and service categories — is no small task. The pressure to cut corners is real. Outsourcing or using LLMs may seem like viable shortcuts, but this raises crucial questions about our value propositions and differentiation. In a race to the bottom based on inventory size and price, we risk becoming indistinguishable from fast-fashion giants like Shein — a transformation that most businesses cannot sustain.
So, what if we took a different approach? What if we focused on doing less, but doing it better? Imagine offering a curated selection of 100 products instead of 100,000, each with a product page that delivers an exceptional, engaging experience. Rather than generic content, these pages could be rich, interactive, and tailored to meet every customer’s need, making the decision to purchase almost inevitable. A depth-first strategy would allow your team to specialise, delivering quality over quantity — exactly what both users and search engines are increasingly looking for.
In this new era of SEO, we must recognize that while digital space is infinite, Google’s and consumers’ attention spans are not. We need to shift from endless expansion to focused refinement. What if every new URL required you to delete an old one? Limiting yourself to fewer pages would force you to invest more in improving and maintaining them, ensuring they provide real value.
The future of successful websites won’t be defined by size but by precision. The websites that thrive will be those that carefully choose their battles, excelling in a few key areas rather than attempting to dominate an infinite digital landscape. Less can indeed be more, and focusing on creating high-quality, user-focused content is the way forward in an SEO world that increasingly values substance over scale.
For existing businesses, suggesting they reduce their inventory of pages, products, and articles by 90% might seem absurd. But trying to maintain, evolve, and compete with an unwieldy, large site might lock you out of the market completely.
