Content Pruning: A Stealthy SEO Weapon You’ve Overlooked

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The saying “too much of a good thing can be harmful” doesn’t only apply to sweet treats or other delectable delights. It’s also applicable to the process of search engine optimization (SEO).

What this means is that having too much thin or unhelpful content on your website—be it a blog or web copy—can actually harm your business rather than help it. This is where the process of content pruning comes into play.

In this article, we explore the concept and why it’s useful, how to apply best practices, and what the major mistakes with content pruning are. Let’s get started.

Understanding Content Pruning and Its Benefits

To understand content pruning, we need to turn to a gardening analogy. Just like gardeners take care of their green spaces, so do SEO specialists take care of their organic content. When it comes to pruning content, the principle revolves around three Rs: refresh, repurpose, and remove.

As we know, Google values quality content over quantity. And if you’ve built up a vast volume of content over the years, you’ll know that some of it is underperforming and this can weigh your website down.

To ensure that all your content is beneficial for your site and relevant for your users, you need to carry out frequent content pruning—approximately every three to six months.

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The benefits of this are enormous. Here are just a few of them:

• Improve the overall quality of your website, making it more user-friendly
• Gain better website authority
• Remove irrelevant content to provide only relevant content to your audience
• Create a stronger and better user experience, driving engagement and trust
• Place a stronger emphasis on your best work and improve content quality
• Improve content organization to lead users through the buyer’s journey
• Make it easier for Google’s bots to crawl your content, index more, and boost rankings
• Reduce bounce rates and increase time on page
• Boost page views, conversions, and other important metrics
• Reduce duplicate content
• Save you time, money, and effort, while helping you focus on your content strategy
• Boost traffic and revenue and strengthen brand awareness

Identify Outdated and Irrelevant Content

The very first step in your content pruning strategy is to identify outdated and irrelevant content. But how can this be accomplished? There are several criteria to look out for when deciding if a piece of content should remain on your site or be repurposed or removed.

Some good examples include the following:

• If your content is outdated (e.g. your content speaks about statistics or information that is no longer relevant or timely)
• If the content no longer aligns with your branding or goals
• Content may no longer be helpful or informative
• It may be poorly written or contain multiple errors, thus contributing to a reduced user experience
• There are duplicates of your content on your site or across the web
• If the page receives very little or no traffic and has a fairly high bounce rate
• And if there are no inbound links to the page

Evaluate Content Quality and Effectiveness

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Evaluating content quality and effectiveness is akin to doing a content audit of your website to determine what should stay, be redirected, or entirely removed.

Here are three ways to do so.

Assess the quality and accuracy of existing content

Although the content pruning process can be time-consuming, make sure you extract all the content (including blog posts, videos, infographics, product pages, service descriptions, images, etc.) and place it in a spreadsheet for easy visualization. Once you have this spreadsheet ready, it’s time to get to work.

Analyze the performance of different content formats

You then need to take each piece of content and analyze it according to key metrics. For example, how high is the traffic coming to each page?; how many keywords does it rank for?; what is the bounce rate?; are there irrelevant keywords that your content includes? Make sure you answer these questions for all your content in terms of blog posts, videos, infographics, web pages, etc.

Identify gaps in content coverage and opportunities for improvement

When you look at the performance of different content formats by evaluating them against different metrics, you can continue to fill in your spreadsheet with data and information that will give you a good visualization of each piece of content’s performance. With such a visualization, you can identify any gaps in your content coverage as well as any opportunities to create engaging content. We touch upon this aspect in more detail below.

Prioritize Content for Pruning

With your spreadsheet and metrics in front of you, it’s time to prioritize the content that you want to prune. For starters, you can add another column to your spreadsheet where you indicate an action that needs to be taken. These actions can range from the following:

• Disregard content: If you’re dealing with a recent refresh of an article and you’re seeing traffic, you’ll want to disregard this piece of content and revisit it later, depending on its performance.
• Optimize content: This often means updating content through using more updated research, repurposing content (e.g. a blog article to an infographic or a video), rewriting the content so that it is free of errors, fresher, and more relevant, carrying out new keyword research to discover any gaps, possibly acquiring new backlinks to improve rankings, etc. You may also want to get new quotes, stats, or links to help boost your article’s performance.
• Consolidate content: this is a good strategy to free up space on your blog. You can do this with redirects of duplicate content and/or consolidating short-form into long-form content. We cover this in more detail below. Here, you’ll want to double-check the content’s meta titles and descriptions, headings and subheadings, image captions, breaking up large chunks of text into shorter paragraphs, using bulleted and numbered lists, etc.
• Unpublish content: For this approach, you’ll want to find the article you want to unpublish, remove any interlinks within the article, unpublish it, and then remove any URL links from your XML sitemap. But how do you know when an article is completely unsalvageable? The answer lies in exploring a few criteria. These include the fact that the article completely misses the user’s search intent. It has low-volume potential that doesn’t validate a rewrite. It has no keyword potential. It is not relevant to your business or audience.

Implement Content Pruning Strategies

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Once you’ve prioritized which content needs pruning according to the different action points above, you’ll want to implement important strategies to achieve your goal.

Depending on the action that needs to be taken, you’ll want to:

• Redirect underperforming articles to higher-performing ones and notify Google and other search engines of your changes. Do this by submitting a sitemap to Google.
• Change all internal links by managing and carefully balancing your link equity.
• Remove content from being indexable by search engines through an index meta tag in the page’s HTML code, essentially blocking it from crawlers. Alternatively, you may want to ask Google to re-index your website.
• Improve accessibility by doing internal linking as part of your internal navigation.

Manage Redirects and Broken Links

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When you have identified which content needs to be removed, you should decide how this should be done. You can do a complete deletion or redirect to another page on your site. Complete deletion requires a redirect, which means telling the search engine bots where to go if they try to access a page that no longer exists.

Optimize Metadata and Internal Linking

For underperforming articles that you want to upgrade, make sure to pay attention to optimizing their metadata. In addition, you’ll want to strengthen your internal linking to ensure that your content gets more and better “link juice”.

Monitor and Measure Content Pruning Success

Whatever action you’ve taken with regard to content pruning, it’s essential to monitor and measure the success of your efforts. You’ll want to keep an eye on your traffic metrics and engagement metrics at the very least. Regarding the former, you’ll want to focus on page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, click-through rates, and search engine rankings. With regard to the latter, you’ll want to focus on time per page, pages per session, social shares, comments, email subscribers, etc.

Common Mistakes and Pitfalls

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Some of the most frequent mistakes that are made when it comes to content pruning include:

• Not doing a full website audit to determine how much content you currently have
• Not accounting for all content types
• Not having accurate performance data
• Not having a clear content strategy and style guide
• Not having a plan in place after the site audit such as disregard, optimize, consolidate, or unpublish
• Cutting your website content too thin, in other words, culling content where there is no need for it
• Struggling to determine the quality of each page

Final thoughts

Content pruning is a careful balancing act that requires a great deal of attention to detail. You don’t want to completely unpublish or redirect an article that has the potential to perform well with a few content optimization strategies.

However, you also don’t want any of the so-called “dead weight” pages to bring your site down. Although the process of pruning content can seem like hard work, it’s an effective way to ensure that your website is always fully optimized to ensure greater performance.

Author

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Velislava Georgieva is an Outreach and Content Manager at Inbound Blogging, specializing in Content Marketing and Outreach Strategies. Besides her passion for digital marketing, she likes yoga, fitness, and hiking. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.