Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupa's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is what is accordion text, and can Google read these? This is an important question because accordion texts is becoming more and more popular in the web world. As websites want to make sure that they have a clean, beautiful looking website, but also enough information to provide for their users, accordion text has become more and more popular, but there are concerns about it being in accordance with SEO. So that's what we want to discuss today.
But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today because this is Zupa's SEO Talk & Tea. Today we have, I have the wrong tea, we have the Jasmine Green Tea from Black & Bold, and this is Jasmine green tea has been a very common guest on our video channel. And essentially the tea is a Jasmine green tea. If you've ever been into a Boba shop, a lot of them if you've ever ordered like a green note tea with Boba, the base they usually use with green tea is Jasmine green note tea or jasmine green tea. So if you've ever been to a Boba shop, you've probably had this tea before, but let's go ahead and get brewing and get talking.
So what is accordion text? Let's start there, but accordion text is if you ever been to a website that maybe has a heading or a question saying FAQ or common questions that we get or instructions on how to use this thing. A lot of times they'll have the question and if you click it, the question once you click, it will expand and your text will appear with the answer to that question. Those are common examples of accordion. They call it accordion because of course it's like, these are the questions and then when you open each question to answer, it'll expand like that. So essentially the text is hidden.
The reason why this is so great is because, like I said earlier at the beginning of the video, a lot of websites want to make sure they provide a really strong user experience. They don't want people to be too inundated with too much texts. They don't want people to look at an ugly page. They want people to have a great time, but there are always users who want more information and the best way to do that is to shelve them under accordions so the people, if they want to read more, they can click it and it'll open up without compromising the look of the entire page.
Therefore, accordions are very popular, especially on eCommerce sites, especially on sites that will have things that they want you to convert, but they want to have as much information for you as possible.
And the question is, is accordion text good for SEO? If you had asked five years ago, the answer was no. Back then, Google was saying that any text that was meant to be hidden, they don't want to really read because there's a reason why you want to hide it. And they felt like you're trying to hide text. You were then trying to hide it for SEO reasons. The understanding has evolved a lot since then. I think a lot of Google has gotten their technology better. But in addition, they have also understood that accordion texts is needed because it just is more versatile for websites.
So nowadays, currently, and this is 2020 as I'm filming this, Google now can read according texts and it's not a problem. So if you want to use accordion text, you're more than welcome. They can read accordion text. You do want to do some testing on the backend side to make sure that they can crawl it and you can have your developers help you with that [inaudible 00:03:05] to do it. But once you can verify that they can read accordion text, you have no problem using it.
Again five years ago you did, nowadays you don't. So again, what I encourage you is if you have a lot of content but you don't want to sacrifice the user experience, go ahead and use that accordion text to go ahead and help you fill in content that helps your SEO, helps your user, but without inundating your site with too much text.
So again, this video is going to be really short. That's what accordion text is. We don't need to go more complex, just know that Google does like accordion text. There are some bodies of thought that think that though they do read accordion texts now, it's still not as high of a priority as text that's not hidden. I think it's marginal at this point. I think a lot of sites want to use accordion text and if you can, go ahead and do it. I don't see any problems with it on the SEO route.
So hopefully that will help answer some questions for your dev teams or for your design teams. That is kind of the SEO perspective. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea. If you guys found the video valuable or it helped you guys out, please like and subscribe. And until then, I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.