When thinking about their SEO strategy, most digital marketers are focused on the addition of new content to help improve their rankings and look like a more trusted company. However, one thing that a lot of marketers fail to do is remove content that is no longer serving them. This is called “content pruning”, and can help you to free up so much more crawl budget so Google can crawl more of your webpages and improve rankings for your improved content.
What Is SEO Pruning and Why Should I Do It?
Simply put SEO pruning is the process of going through your website’s content and either removing or trimming down content that is no longer relevant, accurate, done receiving traffic, or just altogether outdated.
The reason you should do SEO pruning is to firstly, make your website look better and clear out the clutter. If you have blogs from over 5 years old that aren’t ranking as well as they did – it’s probably time to get rid of them and replace them with fresh content.
Second reason is that you can make more room in your crawl budget. Your website is being crawled by Google bots that work to index your website and decide what is strong and weak content, then these bots decide where to rank your content. This process determines your SERP rankings. By clearing up more of the clutter you’ll have less content that the bots have to sift through and you can start to rank higher on Google much quicker.
What Is The Benefit of SEO Pruning?
Providing the users of your website with a high-quality experience when they navigate your website is one of the benefits of regular SEO pruning. Your site will be less likely to display outdated and irrelevant information if you prune your content regularly.
Furthermore, the style of the posts on your site might differ from the style you used when it was founded. As a site owner, you do not want your target audience to stumble upon a blog article with such low-quality content when you have a more refined style on your posts now. By pruning content, you can be proud of the content you have on your site.
How Do I Start SEO Pruning?
Firstly, gather enough data from your site to create an overview of its content. Include all of your images, videos, and PDF files. With Google tools such as Google Search Console, and Google Analytics, you can collect numerous pieces of information about your website, including page views, page value, bounce rate, and external and internal links.
Once you have an overview of your content, the next step is to identify the pages that aren’t performing well. Usually, you will find pages that have outdated and unnecessary information and pages that have duplicate keywords. Auditing for underperformed pages could also reveal pages that drop website traffic, authority, and SERP ranking.
The last step is to decide what to do with the underperforming pages of your website. There are three tasks you can take when deciding the fate of your content. You can either improve the performance of underperforming content, remove outdated content completely, or hide useless content.
You know your content and your industry better than anyone so it’s ultimately up to you to decide which content is worth saving, and which is worth letting go.
The Takeaway
The key takeaway is that content pruning can be a big help in improving your SEO rankings. By opening up more crawl budget for your website you can more quickly get your site indexed by Google and begin to improve on your SEO rankings. Be sure to take your time and consider the overall quality and relevance of the content you want to prune.