When did you last prune outdated digital content to enhance your SEO?
If you’re a gardener, you’ll fully understand the importance of removing dead leaves and branches to boost a tree or plant’s overall health. You’ll understand that doing this, and getting rid of the associated dead weight, directs all of the organism’s energy towards those parts you want to grow.
Exactly the same concept applies to SEO and ‘pruning’ older digital content. And while it may seem counter-intuitive to take away content rather than create it, doing so should improve your rankings with the major search engines such as Google, especially for bigger websites. (Although, equally, it’s never a bad idea for smaller ones, either.)
Good pruning will also mean overall quality and user experience improve, while links only flow to those pages which have impact. Additionally, especially for bigger websites, you only want search-engine crawlers to use your ‘crawl budget’ on those pages which are most important for SEO performance. Cutting under-performing pages means Google prioritises the more significant ones, while users only see relevant, up-to-date information when they visit.
Content pruning should be a continual process; it’s one of those tasks that’s better done little and often. It’s also important that you don’t remove too much stuff in one fell swoop. Focus on the worst-performing pages, and remove content gradually.
At the same time, it makes sense to keep a note of content, from events to special offers, which will become outdated, so you can remind yourself to deal with it as necessary.
Which pages should I get rid of?
- Those with thin or duplicated content
- Those containing redundant information
- Those with poor engagement or traffic
- Those which don’t perform well on social media
- Those which may be cannibalising other content
The process
Combine regular minor ‘snipping’ with regular thorough pruning, and go through the following steps:
- Create an inventory or overview of all your content
- Audit it to assess its performance
- Decide what to do with outdated content – you may be able to improve or update some, rather than just discarding it
How we can help
At Front Page Advantage, we help clients from a broad range of industries and sectors with their content pruning. We could help you, too. Get in touch for some expert advice and guidance. We’ll let you know which pages should stay, which could be improved and which need to be cut away entirely to give room for SEO health and growth, whatever the size of your website.