Content pruning is a digital marketing process that involves removing and consolidating content appearing on a company’s website. Properly executed pruning improves the overall quality and readability of site content and also promotes higher search rankings on Google and other search engines. In this article, we discussed with WNY Holdings about the details involved in content pruning and shares techniques webmasters can use to prune content and improve search engine optimization.
Inventory Your Content
To make a complete inventory of your site content, you can use an inventory application to list out all content, including images, videos, and PDFs. Along with information from your web analytics tool, you should finish with an overview of all content, listed by separate URLs.
For each URL, assess its goal, target audience, and desired keywords and keyword rankings.
Perform an SEO Content Audit
This type of auditing involves making use of the general inventory you have made. You want to be able to evaluate the metrics of every page to identify which pages are performing poorly and are due for some cleaning up. A few poorly performing pages can adversely affect the SEO performance of the entire site.
If you have noticed a decline in the expected traffic to an established website, you are due for a content audit. Content audits can help quickly reveal obvious problems like duplicate content or thin content.
Deciding What to Keep, What to Update, and What to Discard
Prioritize your content by initially marking material that isn’t getting general or organic traffic, has insufficient internal and external links or contains out of date information. Other problem issues to note are pages with poor social media performance, that have thin content, or content that cannibalizes other pages.
Rather than deleting poorly-performing pages, some updating may put them back on the SEO track. Edit titles, meta descriptions, and headings add sections involving newly relevant content and delete sections with outdated content. These are all simple steps that can remedy poor page performance.
When you have decided that a page should be completely removed, note the URL and save the content. That way, if you decide to repurpose the content, it will still be available.
Create a Pruning Calendar
You need to schedule regular site inventories and audits, especially for content that you know will go out of date. Failing to update material and prune irrelevant content eventually harms SEO strategies.
