Learn how to improve your website’s SEO performance through the art of content pruning.
In this article, we’ll break down content pruning—what it is, why it matters, and how to do it right. You’ll find out how to identify underperforming content, the steps to remove it, and tips to keep your site streamlined and SEO friendly.
What is Content Pruning?
Content pruning is the process of systematically removing outdated, irrelevant, or low-quality content from your website with the aim of enhancing site performance, improving user experience, and boosting search engine rankings.
What are the Benefits of Content Pruning?
Content pruning should essentially lead to your website performing better on Google’s search results. The whole idea is to remove content that is weighing your website down so that Google can index the site’s content for useful, relevant and up-to-date information.
Pruning your content also has the following benefits:
- Enhanced Crawl Efficiency: Google assigns a crawl budget (a limited amount of resources) to each site, after which it moves on to another site. Important high-quality pages might not be crawled if less relevant content consumes this budget, potentially affecting your site’s rankings.
- Better User Experience: By updating and removing unnecessary content, you create a more user-friendly experience that encourages visitors to return.
- Increased Organic Traffic: With improved site rankings and user experience, your organic traffic is likely to rise. Additionally, pruning helps prevent keyword cannibalisation and duplicate content, further boosting traffic.
- Greater Site Authority: A site with relevant, up-to-date content is more credible and can attract more backlinks, enhancing its authority.
How to Prune Your Content
Content pruning might sound as easy as your dad’s Sunday morning garden routine, but even he’d agree it’s not just about snipping a few cute little branches here and there.
It’s a strategic process that starts with a site audit.
You might want to gather your whole team and play a game of ‘content survivor’ to decide what pages stay and what pages get the boot.
Identify Low-Performing Pages
Pruning content isn’t just about removing any content but deciding which content to remove. You want to make sure that you’re only considering pages that aren’t performing well.
There are many different factors that you should consider when identifying the low-performing pages:
- How much traffic does the page get from search engines and other sources?
- How many other websites link to this page?
- Has the page been around long enough to attract attention?
- Is the page still important to your current audience?
- Does this page compete with other pages on your site?
- Is the page useful for reasons other than traffic? Does it have important information, help with sales, or serve as a historical record?
Identify Why They’re Underperforming
Understanding why certain pages or content is underperforming is crucial for effective content pruning. By identifying the factors contributing to their poor performance, you can make informed decisions about whether to update, merge, or remove content.
Consider these questions:
- Is the content accurate and up-to-date?
- Does it provide a comprehensive overview of the topic?
- Is the writing tailored for human readers?
- Does the content address the user’s search intent?
- Is it well-written and engaging?
- Does it offer unique value compared to top-ranking competitors?
- Are there other pages on the site that cover this same topic?
Identify an Action
After pinpointing why certain content is underperforming, you need to determine the best course of action.
Whether it’s improving, consolidating, removing, or hiding the content— each decision should be guided by your overall content strategy and goals.
Improve the Content
Enhancing the existing content can involve updating information, adding new insights, or optimising for better readability and SEO. This approach helps retain valuable content while making it more useful and engaging for your audience.
Consolidate the Content
Merging similar pieces of content into a single, comprehensive resource can eliminate redundancy and improve clarity. This ensures users find all relevant information in one place, enhancing their experience and boosting search engine rankings.
Remember to implement a 301 redirect from the page that is removed to the consolidated page. This ensures that any links pointing to the old page will automatically direct users to the new, consolidated content, preserving your SEO efforts and maintaining a seamless user experience.
Remove the Content
Sometimes, the best action is to remove outdated, irrelevant, or low-quality content entirely. Deleting such content can streamline your site, improve crawl efficiency, and ensure that only the best pages represent your brand.
When removing pages, ensure they either display a custom 404 error page or, if there is a relevant alternative, implement a 301 redirect to that page. This helps guide users and search engines to useful content instead of leaving them at a dead end.
Additionally, any pages that return a 404 error and have internal links pointing to them should have those links updated or removed. This prevents users from encountering broken links and maintains a smooth browsing experience on your site.
Hide the Content
Sometimes, content may be valuable to users but not essential for search engine indexing.
In these cases, you can use a “noindex” tag to hide the content from search engines. This way, the content remains accessible to users without impacting your main content strategy.
Prune in Batches
Start by performing a site audit using a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to get a comprehensive list of all the pages on your website. This will help you identify and categorise the different sections of your site, making it easier to tackle content pruning in an organised manner.
Take a systematic approach to content pruning by focusing on specific sections or categories of your website one at a time. By pruning in batches, you can manage the process more efficiently, ensuring each area is thoroughly evaluated and updated before moving on to the next, thereby maximising the content pruning benefits.
For example, start by reviewing all the blog posts on your site. Identify which ones are outdated, irrelevant, or underperforming, and decide whether to update, consolidate, or remove them. Once you’ve completed the blog section, move on to another category, such as product pages, and repeat the process. This step-by-step approach ensures thoroughness and keeps the task manageable.
The Bottom Line
Content pruning is an essential tool for improving site performance and user experience, especially for large websites. By systematically auditing and refining your content, you can ensure that every page serves a clear purpose and aligns with your goals, keeping your site effective and relevant.
