If your website is not showing fruitful results from all the SEO efforts that you have made, it is probably time for content pruning. Most website owners, while implementing SEO strategies for their website, forget about one of the most essential aspects that makes their website rank “content pruning.” Let us learn about it in detail in the article below.
Content pruning, as the name suggests, means cutting off or removing content that doesn’t benefit your website. In simple words, it is the process of removing low-performing or outdated content from your website. By implementing content pruning as one of the search engine optimization methods, website owners can improve their website’s search engine ranking.
Most website owners are generally under the impression that content pruning means completely deleting the content from their website. But this is a huge misconception. Content pruning can mean one of the following things for a website:
Remember that the content pruning strategy you implement for your website must be taken only after careful consideration. So closely analyze the performance of your underperforming pages (numerous online tools exist for this) and implement a strategy that helps you tap into the full potential of your web pages.
Content pruning is important for every website. Search engines allocate a limited crawl budget for every website, which essentially means that engines allot limited resources for crawling and indexing a website within a given time frame. Hence, it is very important for all the web pages on your website to perform at their optimal best.
Just like any other SEO practice, content pruning is a continuous process. So, if your website has fewer pages, pruning it every three to four months is sufficient. Alternatively, if you have a larger website, pruning content on a monthly basis is suggested.
While pruning content, you need to focus on the pages or services that no longer serve you, pages with the weakest content, old posts and announcements, and, lastly, pages with outdated industry trends, studies, and statistics.
The obvious benefit of content pruning is improved content quality. In the content pruning process, you closely analyze the content of websites that are not performing as expected. Once you identify the content, you either delete it if there is no scope for improvement or refresh it, whatever is best. In some cases, you may also consolidate two pieces of underperforming content into one and improve its quality. By doing so, you improve the overall content quality of your website.
Users always appreciate the most relevant, engaging, and accurate content. By pruning content, you can provide your website visitors with the most up-to-date content that answers their queries and gives them a positive user experience.
When your visitors find the content relevant, useful, and engaging, they will return to your website whenever they need it.
Improved Link Distribution:
By now, you all know that content pruning deletes the web pages that have been underperforming. In this process, the internal links that were directed to these pages can now be redirected to other relevant pages. By concentrating on linking to pages that are performing well on your website, you are able to boost the ranking of all the web pages and also truly concentrate on the pages that are giving you fruitful results.
If you were not aware, you would be surprised to know that the Google search engine only crawls through a limited number of pages on a website before moving on to another site. This means that you have a limited opportunity to establish your website’s authority and credibility.
With a limited crawl budget, why waste your time on underperforming pages? With content pruning, you can optimize, delete, or repurpose your content, making sure that Google crawls through your website’s top-performing pages.
Matured websites with a lot of published content benefit a lot from pruning. Following are three types of matured websites and their common pruning indicators:
For newer websites, having the same evaluation criteria as matured ones will be unfair. The organic traffic and engagement rate of a new website will obviously be low. Hence, the following criteria must be taken into consideration:
The optimal frequency of content pruning differs based on the size of a website. As shown in the image above, conducting a pruning process once every three months is optimal for larger websites, and once every six months is suggested for smaller websites.
Moreover, remember that content pruning is not a one-time process. You must perform content pruning on a regular basis or whenever you publish new content on your website. Additionally, you must conduct extensive content pruning once a year to ensure that your website content is up-to-date and engaging.
If you have a lot of pages on your website, you are likely confused about how to start off with content pruning. Here is a step-by-step guide to making the content-pruning process easier for your website:
Firstly, you need to define the project scop. For this, take a close look at all the content to determine what type of content you would like to prune.
Your goal must be to understand why you want to prune your content and what results you are expecting through the process. Is it to increase the conversion rate? Do you want to increase organic traffic to your website? Do you want to improve user experience?
Suppose your goal is to increase the conversion rate, then you need to focus on the product and checkout pages and prune its content.
Once you have defined the project scope, you need to identify low-performing content. For example, let’s say you want to increase your organic traffic to 10,000 per month. In this case, a web page with less than 10,000 organic visitors is an underperforming webpage.
So, how do you find out the amount of organic traffic? Well, the solution is very simple. All you need to do is log into your Google Analytics account and go to report>select acquisition> traffic acquisition. Now, you need to set a date range for the data. You will find the complete report on organic visits on your website.
At this stage, you would want to make a spreadsheet for more clarity. Add the organic traffic value for each page on your spreadsheet and repeat the process for all the pages on your list. Once you have logged in the value of organic traffic for each page, you will easily be able to spot the pages that are underperforming or have organic sessions below 10,000.
You can use the same process to determine the keyword ranking, conversion rate, engagement rate, and much more.
Now that you have a list of all the underperforming pages, it is time to conduct a technical audit to proceed with the content-pruning process. Figure out if there are any technical problems with the pages and, if not, what the issue is.
Here, you can create a separate column in the spreadsheet and list any issues you notice on your pages. If there are no technical issues, go to the webpage and review the content. The first thing you need to do is check its relevance and identify whether it matches the search intent of your audience. Moreover, compare your page to your competitors and identify whether their content offers more value to users.
Most of the time, when we begin with the content pruning process, we miss out on checking the backlink profile of each underperforming webpage. It is very important to check the backlink data because when a high authority website links its content to your webpage, it means that your page is valuable, and Google views such pages with high credibility.
Once you have reviewed the backlink data of your underperforming pages, add a backlink column to your website and log in the number of backlinks each webpage has.
If one of your underperforming web pages has a high number of backlinks, pruning the content may not be a great idea as it will negatively impact your website’s SEO. However, if a page doesn’t have a good backlink profile, you can either delete the content altogether or check for any scope for improvement.
Now that you have gathered all the data, you need to label the content, suggesting the reasons why it is underperforming. For better understanding, you can make a column and mark it as a “problem.” Remember that you must use a logical label from the problem that helps summarize the issue appropriately and leave the column blank for pages that are performing well.
As mentioned above, content pruning doesn’t necessarily mean deleting the content. You can also prune the content by refreshing and consolidating it.
The step that you choose for content pruning will depend on the scope of each underperforming page. Now, create another column on the spreadsheet for the appropriate step that needs to be taken.
However, removing pages from your website may also negatively impact their SEO. Firstly, if you have internal links to the page, deleting them may result in broken links. More deleted pages lead to 404 error pages, and if you have organic incoming traffic to the page, you lose it. Hence, if applicable, you must opt for a 301 redirect.
Content pruning can be an overwhelming process. Therefore, it is important to proceed with one step at a time to avoid confusion. Moreover, after pruning your content, you also need to continuously track the progress to ensure you are in the right direction.
If you are purposing your webpages, start with a few at a time. Only when you see positive results from your efforts should you implement the strategy on all the pages.
To effectively perform content pruning for your website, you need to strategize a plan that will help you identify the weakest web pages. Pruning content without any solid strategy in place will lead to more bad than good.
To effectively apply content pruning as a part of your SEO strategy, you need to focus on the following things:
Content pruning can be a great way to boost the performance of your website if done th right way. The guide above was aimed to guide website owners to obtain fruitful results from their content pruning process.
Remember that pruning content is an ongoing process, and you need to put in the continuous effort to enjoy consistent results.
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