A good content marketing strategy involves publishing content regularly and frequently. Sadly, not all the content performs the way you want it. As you keep on adding more and more blogs over the months and years, it will drag down the SEO health of your website. Sometimes, the content that doesn’t deliver any value takes up all the space and decreases clicks and conversions.
For instance, Google rolled out Core Algorithm Update last year amidst the pandemic. This had a significant impact on the user’s search behavior. Google’s core update also aligns with Google’s focus on high-quality content and freshness. As a result, websites that belong to niches such as healthcare, food, and media saw significant improvement in website traffic, whereas websites on travel, construction, and transportation saw major dips. This explains well the need for content pruning.
The Importance of Periodical Content Pruning
Often, Google revamps its algorithms to emphasize and highlight fresh, valuable content that demonstrates E-A-T. Moreover, low-quality content can affect your search rankings too. So, removing or updating old content helps you to gain back some ranking power. It also makes room for high-performing content that enhances brand awareness and visibility.
Delete Outdated Content
As mentioned earlier, Google’s focus is to serve the users with fresh, relevant, and valuable content. This is the reason why recently published content ranks higher in the search results. It’s also the reason why your website gets punished for outdated content. Outdated content can be anything like discontinued product or service pages, time-sensitive content, content that’s no longer relevant to your business, former employee profiles, an offer or a discount page that’s no longer valid, and more. Deleting these pages do not affect your SEO because they don’t get much traffic, don’t have link equity, don’t rank for your keywords, and more. So, it’s imperative to delete these pages. Removing outdated or poor-quality webpages also helps search engines to crawl your website more efficiently.
Revive Old Content
Have you ever noticed a blog you wrote four years ago suddenly attracting more traffic? This type of content is evergreen, as it withstands the test of time. This also means that the blog answers the questions of your users. But, if you feel the blog used old references or sources, you can take some time to update the blog to reflect the latest developments and practices. This improves the relevance of the content and brings even more traffic to your website.
SEO Factors to Consider for Content Pruning
Test the Page Performance
So, you are ready to remove outdated information or pages from your website. But, how do you know the content is no longer helpful for you? It’s simple! Monitor rates, conversions, and the time spent by the visitors on the particular page. If the old content isn’t contributing to your goals, it’s crucial to remove them from your website.
Analyze Rankings
Check whether the content you are considering to delete ranks well in the search. If it ranks, analyze the effects of losing visibility for those terms if you delete the outdated content. Talk to your content marketing expert to get insights on the impact of deleting and redirecting content.
Google Search Console
Use Google Search Console to identify pages that no longer perform well or Google doesn’t love as much as it used to. Start comparing recent data with last year’s to determine if there is any improvement or new trends. If not, don’t give any second thought to deleting the content. Also, keeping track of the URLs, clicks, and keywords within Google Search Console is helpful in improving the SEO health of your website.
Check Website Traffic
Review the website traffic to check whether the blog is still getting a considerable number of visitors as it did once. Check if you are having visitors from a specific location, as it helps you in deciding whether you want to keep the content or not.
Wrapping Up
Do you want to improve your website’s ranking? Are you looking for ways to boost your brand’s reputation? Content pruning is the best way to improve your website traffic while serving users with fresh, accurate, and valuable content. So, what are you waiting for? Don’t let outdated content languish on your site. Get in touch with the professionals to create a unique content marketing strategy that gives you a competitive edge.
