Why it matters on an HVAC site
Thin on a contractor site rarely means short. It means forty pages sharing 94% of their words, each with a town swapped in, every one of them long.
Word count is the wrong test and is used constantly. A 300-word page answering the question precisely can outrank a 2,000-word page that circles it.
How to check it yourself
- Compare against the ranking set on things that can be counted: subheadings, whether a price range is given, whether a comparison table exists, whether original photographs appear.
- Measure inter-page similarity across your own templated set. Above 90% shared text, they are one page in several costumes.
- Segment the ranking set by page type first, since a manufacturer guide and a contractor service page are not comparable.
Worked through in numbers
Forty service-area pages average 780 words each, which passes any word-count threshold.
Pairwise comparison shows 94% shared text across the set. The only differences are the town name, the county and a stock photo. Of the 40, 6 are indexed.
Eleven pages were rewritten with genuinely local substance, permit requirements, the dominant housing stock and real jobs done there, and 29 were consolidated into a single service page with a served-areas list. Indexation went to 11 of 11.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Content. A page with little of its own, measured against the pages that rank rather than by word count.