A company website often has to deal with tens to hundreds of content pages, depending on the nature of your business and how long you have worked in your industry.
While having a large number of content pages can be a sign of growth, too much of it can bog down your servers and even affect your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
In these situations, content pruning can be your solution. How does it work? Let’s discuss in the sections below:
• What Is Content Pruning?
• 5 Content Pruning Benefits
• A Three-Step Guide To Pruning SEO Content
• 3 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Pruning Content
What Is Content Pruning?
Content pruning is the process of evaluating and removing obsolete, irrelevant or underperforming content from your website.
It focuses on improving your SEO performance and the overall quality of website content by ensuring that the content pieces you keep are valuable and relevant to your audience.
5 Benefits of Content Pruning
Content pruning offers several advantages for websites and businesses. Let’s look at some content pruning benefits in supporting website performance and audience satisfaction.
1. Enhances User Experience
User experience (UX) is a primary consideration in any website’s success. People expect to find clear and helpful information when they visit a website.
Regular content cleanup helps users navigate your website more efficiently, improving their overall experience. Removing unnecessary content and organizing the remaining pages allows you to ensure that visitors can access relevant information quickly and easily.
Since your server isn’t bogged down by unnecessary and irrelevant content, you can streamline navigation and enable faster page load times, leading to a more enjoyable and comfortable browsing experience.
2. Better Content Quality
Content pruning for SEO ensures that only high-quality, relevant content remains on your site. Outdated information, poorly written articles or redundant pages can diminish your credibility, affecting audience trust and search engine rankings.
During the content cleanup process, your content is reviewed to identify pieces that can be refreshed, consolidated or removed.
For example, blog posts with outdated information or statistics can be updated with fresher data to ensure they remain useful and accurate.
As a result, your website’s quality and credibility improves, boosting its reputation in the eyes of your target audience and search engines alike.
3. Higher Organic Traffic
Websites with high-quality, focused content are more likely to rank well in search engine results, as search engines prioritize fresh, relevant material.
Irrelevant or outdated pages can drag down your site’s overall performance. Sure, you may have a few gems here and there, but if you’ve also got a lot of low-quality pages, search engines will give you poor rankings.
Pruning allows you to remove outdated content or lower-quality pages, helping search engines better understand your site’s focus and authority. It also prevents keyword cannibalization and competition from redundant pages.
Updating older content with new keywords and trends can increase its visibility for relevant search queries. These improvements lead to higher organic traffic, better engagement, more conversions and a stronger online presence.
4. Improved Link Authority Distribution
Link authority, sometimes known as link equity, refers to the value or ranking power a specific link can pass from one page to another.
Poorly distributed link authority, often caused by outdated or irrelevant pages, can harm your SEO efforts. When you prune to remove outdated content and low-quality pages, you ensure that your internal linking systems only involve authoritative, high-quality pages.
5. Better Crawling and Indexing
Search engines have what you call a crawl budget, which refers to the number of pages a search engine crawler can access and index within a specific timeframe.
If your website has too many outdated or low-quality pages, it can complicate this process and hinder search engine performance.
An excellent example is HubSpot, who deleted around 3,000 pages from their blog in 2019. This decision helped them save several hours in getting their content indexed by Google’s crawlers.
Content pruning for SEO ensures that only relevant, high-quality pages remain on your site. This process reduces the workload for search engine crawlers, allowing them to focus their efforts on indexing your most valuable pages.
A Three-Step Guide to Pruning SEO Content
If you want to maintain a high-ranking website, content pruning is a crucial strategy that helps keep your site’s relevance and enhance user experience.
However, effective content pruning doesn’t just mean haphazardly removing old content to make room for the new. It requires strategy and discernment to ensure you’re making the right calls.
Here is a three-step guide to pruning SEO content effectively.
1. Define Your Scope and Goals
Before sorting and removing irrelevant content, you need to define the scope of your project and lay out clear objectives. This step helps you stay focused on improving the quality of your website and avoid getting bogged down by unnecessary details.
Your goals might include improving your search engine rankings or increasing user engagement. Be specific about what you aim to achieve with pruning, as this will guide your decisions.
Determining your scope is another crucial step. Pruning all your web pages at once might not be practical in terms of time and resources.
You can always focus on one section at a time. For example, you may want to concentrate your pruning efforts on blog posts or product pages. Narrowing down the scope ensures a more organized approach.
2. Perform an SEO Content Audit
The SEO content audit process involves reviewing your existing content to identify what you need to prune or update.
Here are some key factors you need to look at to assess your content pieces and web pages effectively:
➨ Content Performance
Begin by evaluating the performance of each page that falls within your set scope.
The metrics you use can vary depending on your goals, but the most common ones include organic traffic, engagement, bounce rate and conversions.
Tools like Google Analytics, Search Console and other SEO software can help you analyze this data.
➨ Internal Links and Backlinks
Internal links are essential for SEO, as they help search engines crawl your site and distribute link authority. They also help your audience navigate through your website and find relevant information.
Pages with poor internal linking and little to no backlinks might not perform as well as they could and probably need some help.
➨ Thin Content
Thin content refers to pages that provide little to no value to users or those that have a minimal word count. These pages may not answer users’ queries effectively or could be too brief to warrant an entire web page.
Identifying thin content allows you to expand and update it or remove it if it doesn’t align with your goals.
➨ Outdated Information
Outdated content can significantly impact user experience and SEO rankings. If a blog post or page features information that is no longer accurate or relevant, it may reduce your website’s credibility.
Search engines aren’t also too keen on pushing out content that is inaccurate, irrelevant or several years old.
Identify outdated pages that need a refresh, such as blog posts with old statistics or product pages with discontinued items.
➨ Cannibalistic Content
Content cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on your website target the same keywords. It can confuse search engines and lead to lower rankings for both pages.
During your SEO content audit, identify pages that overlap and decide whether you need to consolidate them or remove one.
3. Make a Decision
Once you’ve gone through your content, it’s time to make decisions about what to do with each piece. Depending on the results of your website content audit, you can take one of four options, which we will discuss below:
➨ Update
For content that is still relevant but just needs a refresh, an update is your best option. This content could include blog posts that still serve their purpose but might have some outdated information and minor claims.
An update can include replacing outdated data or adding newer information, fixing broken links, improving readability or adding new keywords to improve SEO. Updating existing content allows you to maximize your content and improve its performance.
➨ Consolidate
If you have multiple pages targeting similar topics or keywords, it might be best to consolidate them into a single, comprehensive page.
Merge relevant content into one high-quality article and redirect the previous URLs to your new page. This practice helps eliminate redundancies and retain link authority.
➨ De-Index
Most websites have pages that are helpful to existing users but don’t do much in terms of SEO rankings. Examples of these pages include internal search results or thank you pages. De-indexing means disallowing crawlers from indexing specific pages so they don’t appear on search results.
➨ Remove
Some web pages might not make the cut after your website content audit. Removing or deleting content is an option for pages that don’t provide value to your website and can’t be updated or consolidated. Deleting the page is often the best decision if content is irrelevant or outdated beyond repair.
3 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Pruning Content
Content pruning can significantly improve your website performance and search engine rankings when done correctly. However, some common mistakes can undermine your efforts.
Here are some key pitfalls to avoid:
1. Excessive Pruning
Removing too much content can harm your site’s SEO and user experience. While low-performing or irrelevant pages should be addressed, deleting valuable content without a proper website content audit or analysis can lead to a drop in organic traffic.
2. Ignoring Backlinks
Backlinks are essential to good SEO, as they signal authority and trustworthiness to search engines. Deleting content with valuable backlinks can reduce your site’s authority, especially in the eyes of search engine crawlers.
3. Failing To Redirect Content
Removing content without setting up proper redirects can lead to broken links and poor user experience. Visitors or search engines trying to access deleted pages will encounter 404 errors, which can harm your SEO and frustrate users.
Prune Your Way to Better Rankings with Thrive
Content pruning is essential for maintaining a high-ranking and well-performing website. However, it also requires a significant amount of time and effort, especially for larger websites with a lot of content pages.
If you need help with extensive content auditing and pruning efforts, consider working with Thrive. Our digital marketing and content experts can help you evaluate your website thoroughly and make the right calls in content pruning and other SEO initiatives to ensure your website gets higher rankings and provides a streamlined user experience.
Let’s work together. Contact us today.
