Content pruning is the process of identifying and removing low-performing, outdated or irrelevant content from a website to improve its overall SEO performance. Think of it in the same way as pruning a plant – you can encourage healthier growth by removing dead or overgrown parts that are weighing the plant down!
In this blog, we will explore the process of content pruning, how you can do it and why it is important for your website’s SEO. Let’s get started!
Why Is Content Pruning Important?
Improves SEO & Trustworthiness
By removing any old and irrelevant content from your site, you can help search engines like Google find and accurately place your site in search results for relevant queries. This in turn improves your overall site performance and visibility.
Additionally, Google claims that they prioritise content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So, by removing poor content from your site, you can help to create a higher overall standard of quality, which is essential for establishing your site as a trustworthy source. Plus, by ensuring that all content on your site is relevant and useful to your audience and business goals, you can help your site align with Google’s current emphasis on helpful and relevant content, thus boosting your site’s ranking.
Enhances User Experience
Content pruning can also enhance your site’s user experience by creating a more focused, streamlined and up-to-date website, where they are unlikely to be lost or frustrated by outdated information.
In addition to this, content pruning allows for greater exposure to the newer and more relevant content on your site that has real value to your audience, which can help increase engagement, lower bounce rates and create a more positive and stress-free user journey.
Optimises Resources
Search engines have a limited “crawl budget” for each site. By removing unnecessary pages, you can give Google’s bots more time to crawl and index your most important content, preventing them from wasting this budget on low-value or outdated pages.
How to Prune Your Site’s Content
1. Audit Your Content
The first step of content pruning is to conduct a thorough content inventory and audit of all content on your site. Use analytics tools to identify underperforming, duplicate, irrelevant or outdated content.
2. Assess Performance
You will then want to establish a criteria based on performance metrics like organic traffic, conversions, engagement time and backlink quality to identify content for pruning. Using these metrics, analyse your content and identify pieces that are underperforming, outdated or irrelevant to your goals.
3. Take Action
You can then decide whether you want to update, consolidate or remove each piece of content. For outdated content that still has some value, refresh it with relevant and accurate information. For underperforming or similar pieces of content, merge them into a single, more valuable resource. For pages that are no longer serving a purpose or providing any value, you can either deindex so that search engines will no longer crawl them, or remove them entirely.
4. Monitor Results
After pruning your content, make sure you keep an eye on your key metrics like search rankings and organic traffic so that you can evaluate the impact of your changes. You can then use these results to inform your future content creation and maintenance.
By following these easy steps, you can identify and remove any low-performing content that is weighing your site down and create room for new content with the potential to flourish.
At Designer Websites, our SEO experts can help you prune your website’s content and better your overall website health and performance. Get in touch with our team today to find out more!
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