Just look from this perspective. Your website is a garden, teeming with content – informative blog posts, catchy product descriptions, and engaging landing pages.
But just like any garden, over time it can become overgrown with weeds, unwanted plants– outdated information, low-performing content, and duplicate pages.
This is where content pruning comes in.
What is Content Pruning Basically?
Content pruning is the strategic process of identifying and eradicating underperforming or outdated content from your website. It's akin to pruning a tree and removing dead branches to allow healthy ones to grow out. In the context of your website, pruning helps you focus resources on high-quality content that aligns with your audience and better your SEO performance.
Why Should You Prune Your Content?
While creating fresh content is important, neglecting your existing content garden can be detrimental. Guess why?
1. Improved User Experience
Imagine landing on a webpage with outdated information or broken links. Frustrating, right? Pruning ensures users encounter only the most relevant and up-to-date content, enhancing their overall website experience.
2. SEO Perks
Search engines like Google prioritise fresh, high-quality content. By removing low-performing pages, you signal to search engines that your website contains valuable information ultimately adding value to one of the benefits of SEO. As a result, this can lead to improved search rankings for your remaining content.
3. Enhanced Crawl Budget
Search engines allocate resources (crawl budget) to crawl and index your website. With a cluttered website, search engines might miss crucial content. Pruning frees up the crawl budget, allowing search engines to focus on important pages.
4. Streamlined Content Management
Maintaining a vast amount of content can be overwhelming. Pruning simplifies content management, freeing up resources for promoting your best content and creating new, high-value pieces.
Is Content Pruning Right for You?
Content pruning is beneficial for websites of all sizes. Here are some indicators that your website might be ripe for pruning:
- You have a large volume of content. As your content library grows, the chances of outdated or low-performing content increase.
- Your website analytics show low-traffic pages. Pages with consistently low traffic might not be serving a purpose.
- You have duplicate content. Duplicate content confuses search engines and dilutes your SEO efforts.
- Your content doesn't align with your current brand strategy. As your brand evolves, your content should too. Identify content that no longer reflects your brand's voice or message.
How to Create a Content Pruning Strategy?Aka, the Process
Now that you understand the benefits, let us dive into the entire process of content pruning:
1. Content Audit: The first step is an in-depth content audit. Make use of website analytics tools like Google Search Console to identify low-traffic pages, pages with high bounce rates, and orphaned pages (pages with no backlinks).
2. Content Evaluation: For each identified page, ask yourself:
- Is the content outdated or inaccurate?
- Does the content provide value to the target audience?
- Does the content align with your current SEO strategy and brand message?
- Is the content well-optimised for search engines?
3. Content Pruning Decisions: Based on your evaluation, categorise the content into three buckets:
- Delete: Content that offers no value, is outdated, or is a duplicate can be safely deleted. However, ensure proper redirection is set up to avoid broken links.
- Refresh: Content with potential can be revamped with updated information, improved visuals, or a stronger call to action.
- Consolidate: If you have multiple pages with similar content, consider merging them into a single, comprehensive resource.
4. Gathering information on your website content: Make a list of your website's URLs and their performance data (e.g., page views, backlinks, social shares). Consider using SEO tools like Semrush to get recommendations on content improvement.
5. Setting goals for your content: Identify the purpose of each piece of content (e.g., ranking for a keyword, promoting a product). Track how well your content meets those goals (e.g., conversion rate for a product page). Decide if you'll improve underperforming content, create new content, or remove it entirely. Instead of drowning in everything at once, focus on specific topics important to your business or brand. Gather all the content related to that topic, along with its performance data. This lets you prune your website in smaller steps, giving you little wins to celebrate along the way. Plus, it can quickly boost the performance of that specific topic area. This bite-sized approach is also a great way to fight keyword cannibalization. That's when multiple pages on your site compete for the same keywords in search results, confusing search engines and hurting your ranking. By focusing on specific topics and goals for each page, you can avoid this cannibalistic competition.
6. Look for orphaned content: That is, pages with no internal links from other parts of your website. This might be outdated content or content that doesn't perform well. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools like Yoast SEO that easily help you find orphaned content.
What are Some Best Practices for Content Pruning?
1. Prioritise: Start by pruning content that is mainly low-performing or outdated.
2. Back-Up: Always back up your content before deleting anything (first things first).
3. Redirects: Set up proper 301 redirects to ensure users and search engines land on the appropriate page after deletion.
4. Content Refreshment: Revamp high-potential content with fresh information and SEO optimization techniques.
5. Track Results: Monitor your website analytics after pruning to see the impact on traffic, engagement, and SEO rankings.
Content Pruning…A Continuous Process…
Content pruning isn't a one-time activity.
Regularly revisit your content to ensure it remains valuable and relevant. Schedule regular content audits to identify new pruning opportunities and keep your website's content garden thriving. By strategically pruning your content, you curate a website that offers a superior user experience, strengthens your SEO strategy, and allows your best content to shine. A well-maintained website is a source of attracting and engaging your target audience. So, grab your shears and start cultivating a content garden that blooms with your business success!
And why not get it done by an SEO agency rather than doing it all by yourself?
With experience in ranking brands’ websites from scratch, we at Brown Men Marketing take care of everything you need for your brand from keyword research to strategy.
For more updates, follow Brown Men Marketing on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
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