Content Pruning: Why Less Content Can Drive More Traffic

“More content leads to more traffic” is a huge misconception that has lived rent-free in most bloggers’ heads. But this is the easiest way your website could hit the rock bottom of Google’s rankings.

Publishing loads and loads of content isn’t just enough to seduce the algorithm and have more eyeballs strolling into your website. However, a better result-driven solution is content pruning.

Understanding Content Pruning: What It Is and Why It Works

By definition, content pruning involves removing or updating underperforming content to improve search rankings, user experience, and overall website performance. It is like cutting off the low branches of a tree to improve its overall health and have it grow just the way you want.

But in this case, you’re pulling down low-quality pages from your website so it can flourish. Here’s the catch: sites that benefit more from content pruning are big brands that have hundreds and even thousands of pages.

Why? Many of these pages are generated automatically. You can imagine that just a minor bug could generate a few thousand irrelevant pages. These pages often get no traffic and generate no revenue, so deleting them is an easy decision.

However, smaller sites can also benefit from this. But just before you start chopping off pages from your websites, it’s important to understand the role of search intent and relevance in modern SEO so you can create better content or modify outdated ones to suit the intention of your audience.

Search intent is the reason why users conduct searches: to find a satisfying answer to their questions or to know more about a topic. The performance of your website depends largely on this. Then, you can maximize this performance using formstory to optimize your lead captures and monitor forms, ensuring no information is lost.

Before now, it was all about integrating certain keywords rather than focusing on the information attached to those keywords. But that is no longer enough. Google has gotten smarter, shifting its focus onto the user’s experience and providing search results that give searchers the best possible results.

What this means is that every content you publish must now have valuable information that matches and expands on those keywords. Your content and landing pages must be appealing and relevant to your audience and their search intent.  With this in mind, you can now filter through the pages that meet these requirements and know the next step to take.

The Cost of Poor Traffic and Low-Quality Content

One major issue with having an abundance of low-quality content is that it not only hurts your SEO but also leads to lost potential customers. When your site is filled with irrelevant, outdated, or poorly optimized content, it fails to attract the right audience.

Visitors who do land on your website may quickly bounce due to a lack of engaging, valuable information. This leads to a direct loss of leads, as potential customers are less likely to trust or engage with a brand that does not provide authoritative and useful content.

A poorly maintained website can create a frustrating user experience, causing visitors to seek alternatives elsewhere. Moreover, low traffic due to weak content reduces the chances of converting site visitors into actual leads or customers.

To counter this, businesses must ensure their content aligns with user intent, is well-optimized for search engines, and provides value that keeps visitors engaged. Regularly pruning outdated content and refreshing key pages can make a significant difference in lead generation and business growth.

How to Identify Content That Needs Pruning

To identify content that needs pruning, you first need to identify which pages on your website are underperforming. Maintaining only relevant and high-quality content is crucial for accurate evaluation of SEO metrics.

Below are ways to actionable steps to help you identify content that needs pruning.

1. Use Google Analytics and Search Console: Google Analytics and Google Search Console are just the perfect tools to start with for identifying pages with decreasing search traffic and rankings.

Google Analytics: it’s not as tricky as it sounds. Simply navigate to the “Behavior” section and then select “Site Content” to view the performance of individual pages over time. Look for pages that have experienced a steady decline in traffic.Google Search Console: This tool provides more insights into keyword rankings. Check your “Performance” reports to find pages that have dropped in keyword rankings or impressions.

2. Evaluating Content Performance: Keep track of the performance of key content assets over time using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. They would give you detailed reports on content rankings and traffic patterns. Here is what you should look out for:

Decline in keyword rankings: Check if your content is no longer ranking for its target keywords or if new competitors have taken the top spots. This helps you identify pages that used to perform well but now see fewer visitors.

3. Engagement metrics: Analyze SEO performance metrics such as bounce rates, time on page, click-through rates (CTR), and conversion rates. This helps you know if the content is still engaging readers. Pages with low engagement may indicate irrelevant or outdated content. It’s like having a blog post from 2013 on your site about the ‘latest’ tech trends.

Deciding: Update, Consolidate, or Delete?

Here comes the big decision: knowing when to update, refresh, or delete low-performing content. There are several ways to go about this and this section helps you decide the best solution.

When to Update and Refresh Content

Misaligned Content: If the content seems out of touch but still matches current industry trends, then it needs to be refined.Not Mobile-Friendly: If your content doesn’t display well on smartphones and tablets, you could see high bounce rates among mobile readers.Ineffective Calls to Action (CTAs): If your CTAs are outdated or not compelling, then you would only need to retouch that.Low Conversion Rates: If your website isn’t converting visitors into leads or customers, perhaps it’s time to give your content a refresh and make it more persuasive.

How to Merge Overlapping Articles

To merge overlapping articles, you first need to identify the articles that overlap, sort them based on their relevance, and then combine the most relevant information into a single article while removing irrelevant sections. This ensures that consolidated content is comprehensive and accurate.

When and Why to Remove Content Permanently

You know content should be removed permanently when it is inaccurate, has legal issues, threatens your reputation, or is no longer relevant to your audience. Also, hacked or spam content should be removed immediately. This maintains website integrity and optimizes the user experience.

Best practice for setting up redirects to maintain SEO value

The best way to redirect for URLs that are no longer relevant without losing SEO traffic or value is to use a 301 permanent redirect. This tells search engines that the page has permanently moved to a new URL. This way, the SEO value of the old URL is transferred to the new one, preserving rankings, backlink equity, and traffic.

Implementing Content Pruning Without Harming Your SEO

Below are ways in which you can implement the pruning process without disrupting the flow of traffic on your website.

Safeguarding internal linking structure: Internal links are hyperlinks that point to pages on the same domain. First, ensure your links are structured hierarchically. Once this is in place, ensure the links flow from top to bottom in that order. The home page should link to category or topic pages. Each of those core pages should link to subpages and supporting content.Managing URL changes and avoiding broken links: To do this, prioritize using permanent URLs when possible, implement proper redirects when necessary, and update links if your site structure changes, maintaining good SEO practices.Ensuring proper indexing and deindexing strategies: Indexing and deindexing strategies improve query performance by creating or removing a separate data structure that allows Google to easily locate and access specific data rows rather than scanning through the entire table. This strategy also reduces the time required for retrieving data easily.Measuring the impact of pruning on traffic and rankings: tools like Google Analytics and Search Console are perfect for this. From time to time, look for improvements in organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates. This tells if more changes need to be made.

Long-Term Content Maintenance Strategy

Even with everything said so far, it is necessary to regularly review, update, and optimize your existing content to ensure it remains relevant and valuable to your audience over time. Although it may seem time-consuming, it will help you save time and resources and generate better ROI from your content marketing efforts.

Long-term content maintenance strategy includes:

Creating a content audit schedule (quarterly, bi-annually, etc.): Here, you create a periodic content audit every 6 or 3 months, where you analyze your existing content to assess what is working and what isn’t and also identify areas needing updates or removal.Using automation and AI-driven tools for ongoing analysis: AI has made your work 10X easier. Tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Semrush would do the job for you with inch-perfect details.

Conclusion

This is more like a content marketing masterclass converted to an article. Just like removing leaves and dead branches helps keep a tree healthy, the same goes for your website. Understanding the content pruning concept can change your content game for good. Start maintaining your website today, and get ready to reap a bumper harvest of traffic.