How To Prune Content Like an SEO Pro (Without Losing Traffic)

Content marketing captures your target audience’s attention, and having more mere content does not benefit your business. Although content reigns in your digital marketing efforts, you must have high-quality content that appeals to the pain points of the target persona. Lack of such content adversely affects your endeavours online. Brand new content cannot be created for each occasion, but the best way is to use content pruning. In this blog, you will understand the importance of content pruning in your SEO content audit checklist and how to improve SEO by content pruning.

What is content pruning?

What is content pruning? Just like pruning a plant to bear more fruit and healthier growth, outdated or low-quality content on a website needs pruning. Such updated, valuable as well and consolidated content adds value to the end user and they are likely to visit, engage and convert more than ever with your brand. Google algorithm update also loves evergreen content and rewards it.

Pruning a tree is what you would compare with content pruning; the dead branches and leaves have been removed, so the entire tree is healthier, and all the energy is sent where you want it to grow the whole time. Here, the thought is the same as the content.

You might have blog posts or articles that deal with outdated topics, or the points you have covered are no longer relevant to the target audience. For example, you might have written outdated software tutorials or a guide on how to use a programming language that people no longer use. This content on the website cannot help in ranking or steady traffic. Instead, it is a burden for your search engine optimization efforts. Through content pruning, context-relevant and information-rich content can be provided to the target audience, and scattered pieces of low value can be removed entirely.  In content pruning SEO, quality matters over quantity. 

Why should you prune website content?

Why to prune your content? If you would like to see a surge in traffic and want to serve your target in the right manner, you need to remove outdated content for SEO. Pruning content accentuates your SEO efforts and helps you covet a better SERP rank on search engines. It can certainly enhance overall website quality, boost link equity distribution, register steady engagement and dwell time, boost crawl budget efficiency and aid in keyword targeting. These content pruning benefits provide better results for your business. 

When to prune your content?

Remove outdated content for SEO is a necessary action your digital marketing team must adhere to reap various benefits. When you prune website content, the question encountered will be  ‘when to prune content’, and the following compelling reasons make sense:

• Low/No traffic pages—Your website can experience low or no traffic due to several factors, but content quality affects the most. After a careful analysis, you can prune existing content to drive desired traffic.

• Outdated information – Your website might contain stellar long-form content with outdated information. Content pruning helps you remove irrelevant content.

• High bounce rate– When people find out the website is lacking relevant content, it results in a high bounce rate. Content pruning is one way to resolve issues regarding content to reduce the bounce rate.

• More 0-click pages in GSC and GA – 0-click pages in GSC and GA indicate invaluable and irrelevant content on your website. Each metrics in both tools indicate a need for content pruning.

• Expired flagposts – Flagposts that contain offers, broken links and expired offers have to be removed from your website within a timeframe to stay relevant. 

• Thin or duplicate content – Your website may contain content on relevant topics, but a lack of depth and duplicate pages may affect your ranking. If you know how to prune content for better rankings, you will be able to get the desired results. Google algorithm update checker helps you with duplicate or thin content issues.

• Low value pages – There might be lots of content that adds no value to the end-users and such content needs to be removed, rewritten, or consolidated.

• Cannibalising content – Cannibalising content is another issue that can be resolved with content pruning. Canibalization of keywords in content confuses search engines and perilously affects SERP ranks. 

The Content Pruning Process

Content Inventory 

An inventory is a list of all your digital content on websites and other platforms. It provides a comprehensive understanding of what you have you got in SEO content pruning. Content inventory outlines all content in a structured format and always follows a rigid format with title, URLS and meta tags. 

• Select the market’s best SEO tool for listing out content 

• Make sure your content inventory also contains relevant assets on each content, such as images, PDFS, videos and others.

• Do the process regularly to get a fair idea of your content landscape

Content audit 

A content audit is must must-have step in SEO content pruning. It systematically examines the entire content to analyse their relevance, quality, quantity, performance and efficiency. 

• Performance analysis – Performance analysis measures content against various metrics such as readability, page load time, social shares, backlinks, bounce rate and engagement rate

• Internal and external link analysis – A thorough external and internal linking performance is a must-have to optimise it for SEO. This process examines the state of your internal and external links and helps you address any broken links.

• Content quality – Assessing content quality, look for two dimensions.”

• Thin content – Does your website contain thin and poor-quality content?

• Keyword cannibalisation -Is your website competing for the same keywords on multiple pages?

• Check for outdated information – All kinds of outdated content are removed without a second thought.

Decide what to do

After a careful analysis, you can determine how to improve SEO by content pruning. You can decide what to do with your content, and the following are standard practices:

• Repurpose content – Transform existing content to different formats to make it digestible for your target.

• Consolidate content – Merge similar content or tame it to make it a complete resource to help the target persona, considering search intent.

• Remove content – If you find content that provides no value to the end-user, it’s time to remove it entirely as part of SEO content pruning. 

• Update content – Some pieces of content also need to be updated with the latest information to make them relevant to the target audience. Improving the format, adding statistics and current information on the subject are some ways to accomplish the content pruning process. 

Common mistakes to avoid

When you ponder how to improve SEO by content pruning, you need to be aware of these mistakes and take precautions for the same.

• Never delete pages without a proper redirect – If you are removing a web page entirely, you need to provide a redirect without fail. 

• Do not overdo SEO content pruning – Overdoing content pruning cuts down relevant information from the target audience and affects SEO rankings.

• Pruning with the wrong tools – If you do not use the right tools to prune it, it can negatively impact SEO.

• Lack of post-prune performance – After content pruning, you need to monitor the performance of pruned content. It helps you to have an understanding of how effective your content is.

• Never remove evergreen content – Your website will have evergreen content that you have written earlier, but is still relevant. You need to make sure you are not removing such content while doing SEO content pruning. 

• Pay attention to broken site architecture – Not responding to broken site architecture can cause a negative user experience. 

• Not heeding to backlink profile – Removing entire pages that contain high-quality backlinks adversely affects the authority of your website. 

With successful content pruning, you can even redesign website without losing SEO & traffic.

Content pruning benefits

The following content pruning SEO help your target audience find information quickly and helps them in making decisions. 

1. Improved Rankings – When you remove outdated information, search engines regard your website as influential, helping people to come up with the best decisions. 

2. Enhanced Crawl Budget – Content pruning SEO also helps your website’s crawl budget, as you need not spend it on unimportant pages.

3. Reduced Cannibalisation – Dilution of search engine signals in ranking occurs in keyword cannibalisation, and content pruning helps you avoid that.

4. Improved Link Authority – Link equity on valuable content increases the overall authority of your website.

5. Higher Conversion Rates – Your target persons engage with content that is well-organised and relevant to their pain points. 

6. Increased dwell time – Your target audience is likely to dwell on pages if the content meets their demands. 

7. Reduced Bounce Rate – By removing irrelevant or low-quality content, content pruning can help reduce bounce rate.

How to prune content for better rankings

Content pruning SEO safe practices 

1. 301 redirects – Inclusion of 301 redirect HTTP Status code is a top content pruning practice that you can employ to deliver a consistent user experience and prevent broken links. 

2. Updating content before removing – If you find invaluable information, you might be tempted to remove it entirely. But before removal, you can update or repurpose content to boost its relevance. 

3. Setting expectations with analytics – Make sure all your content pruning efforts are data-driven and realistic to reap maximum benefits. 

4. Top SEO tools – Content pruning steps need to be meticulously created using the top SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush and ClearScope.

Conclusion

SEO content pruning has multiple benefits for your business. To amass all listed benefits, you need to employ the best tools, practices at the same time avoid common mistakes. Understanding the value of content pruning at regular intervals is a must to be at the top of the competitive curve within your niche. 

FAQs: Content Pruning

What is content pruning?

Removal, updates, consolidation and repurposing of content to increase content value is known as content pruning. 

Is content pruning good for small websites?

Yes. Content pruning is especially beneficial for small websites where you have only a few web pages and you must fill them with worthwhile content.

How often should I prune content?

That depends on how often you update your entire website with content creations. Some businesses with large websites need ot conduct pruning every six months, or smaller websites once a year. 

What tools help with content pruning?

Top SEO tools, as well as Google Analytics, can help with content pruning, providing benefits.

What are content pruning benefits?

Many benefits can be availed of using content pruning and are as follows:

• Reduced Bounce Rate 
• Increased dwell time
• Higher Conversion Rates 
• Improved Link Authority
• Reduced Cannibalisation
• Enhanced Crawl Budget
• Improved Rankings

For such informative and trending insights, connect with GTECH, one of the leading search engine optimization company in Dubai, UAE.