In this post you will learn:
Lots of content doesn’t always equal huge improvements in your website’s ranking. Making sure that content is valuable and relevant to your target audience is key and content pruning can help improve your rankings.
It’s important to review the content on your site once a year at least and make sure that it has not gone out of date or stale.
Content pruning – as it is known – is a must if you want your local business to climb the rankings or stay on page 1. This involves updating or removing content that may no longer be relevant and could affect your pages’ rankings.
The simple rule is the more you publish, the more you should prune. This is to make sure that your content doesn’t become out of date with current trends, changes in law or algorithm changes and also that it aligns with your brand’s goals.
Why should you do it?
The main reason for examining your content is that it stays in line with Google’s algorithm updates.
That algorithm could change tomorrow to set a keyword density of 3 which means they don’t want you using keywords more than three times in a post.
Google doesn’t want keyword-heavy content that gives people using their service little value. A small amount of pruning on content can affect your site’s visibility.
The goal of all content on your website should be to inform, engage and encourage further interaction with your products or service.
To do that, your content has to help readers discover a solution to their pain points. Making sure your content is not just a collection of words that will not make sense to search engine bots or those searching for a solution means your content should be kept short and sweet.
All content must answer the questions that your audience is asking (search intent).
Just as quality content can improve your rankings, the opposite is true if your content is ill-informed or has no clear value to users.
Focused on brand
Content pruning also helps you find and change content that may no longer align with your business goals. For instance, images depicting high use of energy may need to be replaced because the business has become carbon neutral.
All pages and blogs need to be there to accomplish a purpose and can be better optimized to fit in with brand goals that may have been established since the page was designed or the blog was written.
Outdated content
It is inevitable that over time, some of the older pieces of content can lose their relevance. For example, if you have content about an iPhone X that is probably no longer relevant to readers. You have a choice with such content. You can delete it entirely or you can no-index it to keep search engine crawlers away from it. The latter is usually a better option as nobody wants to see a ‘404’ message.
How do you prune content?
At SEO Agency Cork we have a very specialized way of doing it because it is quite complex. There is a DIY method. Create a dashboard in your Google analytics and export a list of all indexed URLs from Google Search Console.
Google’s own tools in Google Analytics can help you see how much organic traffic you get, how long they stayed on particular pages and what the bounce rate on those pages is. Bounce rates are important because they give an indication that the information may not be relevant.
These are all handy indicators as to where pruning may be needed.
Next, you need to prioritize which work is most important and begin working on those pages and blogs.
Conclusion
This process can be more productive and helpful to rankings than generating new content if you have re-optimized older content. It makes sure that your content is more valuable and authoritative than it was before you started the process.
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