How Content Pruning Can Transform Your Website Performance

Have you ever considered evaluating the content on your website that isn’t performing well?
If not, it’s time to make this a priority. 

No matter what your goal is – be it generating leads, boosting conversions, enhancing brand awareness, or increasing
e-commerce sales – content is a key factor in achieving them. Well-crafted content that focuses on specificity helps you connect with your audience, communicate your message clearly, and drive them to take the desired action. Content shapes brand perception, influences buying decisions, and effectively supports all aspects of your marketing and business objectives. 

As your website grows and adds more content over time, old, outdated, or low-quality content can start affecting your SEO strategy.

While content is crucial, there are times when you might find that some of it isn’t quite hitting the mark. When that happens, it’s important to make thoughtful decisions to boost its effectiveness. Carefully evaluate the content, and either optimise or remove underperforming pages (content) to ensure everything aligns with your business goals and helps drive the expected results.

That’s exactly what Content Pruning is. Now, let’s see what it means and why it matters.

Content pruning is all about giving your website some much-needed attention by reviewing and either removing, updating, or consolidating content that’s not pulling its weight. Think of it as tidying up your digital space. When you get rid of outdated, low-performing, or redundant content, you not only boost the overall quality of your site but also make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Plus, Google loves a well-organised site. It’s a simple yet powerful way to keep your website fresh, relevant, and user-friendly.

Is it really worth pruning your website content?

Content pruning can be a game-changer for your SEO, boosting your website’s overall performance and health. Regularly pruning your content will help keep your site in excellent condition, ensuring it’s relevant, high-quality content, and optimised for both users and Google. 

Let’s explore some of the advantages of a good content pruning strategy – 

1. Improved Rankings – Focus on quality content by removing or updating low-quality or outdated content. This makes it easy for Google to identify and rank your high-quality content leading to better rankings for your most valuable pages. 
2. Reduce Keyword Cannibalization – Pruning redundant or similar/duplicate content will help fix any keyword cannibalization issues, where multiple pages compete for the same keyword, diluting your SEO efforts.
3. Better Indexation – Pruning will enhance crawl efficiency by allowing crawlers to focus on your most important pages, leading to more effective indexing and faster crawling.
4. Improved User Experience – A streamlined website with only relevant, valuable content makes for a better user experience, encouraging longer visits and reducing bounce rates.
5. Easier Navigation – Pruning helps declutter your site, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, which can boost engagement and conversion rates.
6. Increased Organic Traffic – By concentrating on fewer, high-quality pages, you can enhance your content’s performance in search engine results, leading to more organic traffic to your site.
7. Targeted Keyword Optimization – Pruning lets you optimise your remaining content more effectively for specific keywords, boosting its relevance and visibility in search results.
8. Strengthened Site Authority – Removing or merging low-performing pages helps consolidate link equity, boosting the authority of your more valuable pages.
9. Better Engagement Metrics – High-quality content that resonates with users often leads to increased engagement, social shares, and backlinks, all of which enhance site authority.
10. Adaptation to Algorithm Updates – Regular content pruning ensures your site aligns with Google guidelines, especially those focused on content quality, which is crucial for adapting to algorithm updates.
11. Quick Recovery from Penalties – If your site has been impacted by an algorithm update or manual penalty, pruning low-quality or irrelevant content can help accelerate recovery.
12. Long-term SEO Health – Pruning prevents content bloat, which can slow down your site and harm SEO. Regular pruning keeps your site lean and efficient.
13. Continuous Improvement – Ongoing content pruning promotes continuous improvement, ensuring your website stays relevant and competitive in search engine rankings.

The content pruning process involves three key steps.

1. Content Audit – Reviewing all existing content to assess relevance and performance.
2. Identify Underperforming Content – Determining which content is outdated, redundant, or low-performing.
3. Take Action – Updating, consolidating, or deleting content, and adjusting internal links and redirects.

How should you start the content pruning process?

To get started with content pruning, first create a website repository and organise your content into different categories. This will make it easier to analyse and manage the plan effectively. Once you’ve categorised your content, conduct a content audit to pinpoint areas that need more attention by examining which pages might require tweaks or improvements based on their performance. Next, set clear goals for what you want to achieve with your content. For example, if your goal is to boost the ranking of conversion-focused content, concentrate on auditing and refining your business-critical pages.

You can use these easily available tools for a content audit – 

• Screaming Frog for crawling the website to get a list of all URLs.
• Google Analytics for tracking content performance.
• Google Search Console for search visibility and keyword data.
• Google Sheets for organising the content and planning the audit.

You can also use other tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, ContentKing, DeepCrawl, etc.

To effectively identify underperforming pages, thoroughly examine key metrics. The specific metrics you use will depend on your marketing goals, which could include impressions, clicks, sessions, keyword rankings, conversion rate, engagement rate, page views, bounce rates, and the number and quality of backlinks. Analysing these metrics will help you identify areas that require improvement. 

Here’s a structured guide to help you identify underperforming content using various methods. 

1. Content Inventory/Performance Data – 

• Gather data on content performance using Google Analytics by identifying pages with low traffic. 
• Analyse user engagement by reviewing metrics such as bounce rate, average time on page, and exit rate. 
• A high bounce rate can help identify pages where the content may be irrelevant, while a low average time on page suggests that the content isn’t engaging. 
• A high exit rate indicates that users are leaving without further exploration.
• Monitor conversion metrics, such as conversion rate, to analyse content effectiveness in driving actions; pages with low conversion rates may indicate that the content is not persuasive enough. 
• Evaluate the contribution to site goals by assessing goal completions to identify underperforming content. 
• Compare against historical data to understand traffic trends. Identify pages that are declining to spot content that may be losing relevance or usefulness. 

2. Evaluate SEO Performance –

• Analyse SEO performance by evaluating keyword rankings to identify pages with poor rankings. 
• Use tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to locate pages with dropped or low rankings for target keywords.
•  Compare impressions versus clicks to assess search visibility and engagement; high impressions with low clicks may suggest a need for improved optimization. 
• Evaluate the click-through rate to gauge the effectiveness of titles and descriptions. Google Search Console can identify pages with low CTR, indicating a need for better optimization or enhanced alignment with user intent.

3.Assessing Content Quality and Relevance- 

• Evaluate content quality and relevance by checking readability to ensure the content is easy to read.
•  Use tools like Grammarly or SEMrush to assess readability, as difficult content may lead to user disengagement. 
• Analyse content relevance to determine if it aligns with your audience and goals; this requires a manual review to ensure it remains relevant and aligned with current business objectives. 
• Also, manually review content to identify any thin content and assess its depth and value.

4. Benchmarking Content Against Competitors – 

• Conduct a competitor analysis to benchmark your content against that of your competitors. 
• Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to compare your content with competitor’s content, identifying gaps and areas for improvement. 
• Perform a manual review for in-depth research and insights.

While you identify the underperforming pages, be sure to rule out any technical issues that might be affecting their performance. Start categorising the pages based on the reasons for their lack of effectiveness. This could include technical issues, thin content, duplicate content, outdated content, or mismatched intent

Now it’s time for action! Decide on the strategy for these pages. Start by fixing technical issues that might be causing roadblocks. For pages with valuable backlinks but thin content, consider a content refresh. Plan to merge similar pages with duplicate content to prevent keyword cannibalization, and make sure you have a redirection strategy set up. Lastly, delete pages that don’t add any value to your website and ensure that a 410 status code is applied.

If this seems a bit overwhelming, don’t worry. We’ve tackled this before, and it turned out really well!

A website revamp gave us an opportunity to audit and prioritise the content and website structure. We worked on the minute detailing of every underperforming page, anticipated how changes would impact key metrics, and made strategic decisions based on our findings. The content cleanup has already shown that our efforts were worth it.

Here’s what we did – 

• Enhanced thin content 
• Removed unhelpful content.

Why we did this – 

Since Google’s Panda update in 2011, their algorithms have been focused on filtering out low-quality content. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to consider content pruning as part of a larger strategy to enhance content quality and increase topical authority. With the Google Helpful Content Update integrated into its core algorithms, having a strategic content plan is essential to ensure your content stands out as genuinely helpful and valuable. 

Strategic Framework – 

Our approach involved identifying and removing “dead pages,” which were pages that had fewer than 200 impressions over the past 16 months. After the website was launched, a significant spike in impressions, clicks, and organic sessions was noted, particularly in the blog section where we had considered deleting pages. The following GSC and GA data demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy. It’s too soon to draw definitive conclusions, but it’s a promising start.

Simple Mantra We Followed – 

• Update and optimise existing content.
• Merge similar or duplicate content and set up redirects.
• Redirect old, dead pages with high-quality backlinks.
• Prune by deleting with a 410 status code.
• Use “noindex” for dead pages that can’t be deleted.

Significant Impact – 

Our content pruning strategy has already shown positive results, with organic impressions for the blog section up by 95% and clicks increased by 79%. We’ve also seen a significant improvement in organic sessions. While we’re still in the early stages, we’re hopeful for even better outcomes in the coming weeks. Even with Google’s latest core update, announced on August 15th, we expect this strategy to continue making solid progress after the rollout.

Common mistakes to watch out for –

1. Removing Large Volumes of Content Without Strategy – Avoid deleting too much content at once without a strategic plan. This can disrupt your site’s structure and negatively impact SEO. Drastically reducing large amounts of content from your site can lead to a significant drop in keyword rankings, organic traffic, and potentially the site’s overall authority. Google might struggle to understand the relevance of your site if too much content disappears suddenly. 
2. Eliminating Relevant Content – Don’t remove content that, while not currently driving much traffic, may still be valuable to users or align with future business goals. Some content may still be relevant to users, even if it doesn’t bring in much traffic. This includes evergreen content, content that supports long-tail keywords, or content that might be important for specific user queries. Always assess the value of the content from both an SEO and user perspective before removing it.
3. Neglecting User Intent – If content serves a specific user intent, even if it’s not popular, it should be considered carefully before removal. Understanding why users might be visiting a page, even if infrequently, is crucial for making informed pruning decisions.
4. Not Redirecting Deleted Pages – If you delete content without setting up proper 301 redirects, you risk losing any link equity that the page had accumulated. Users and Google will also encounter 404 errors, which can harm your site’s credibility and rankings. Alternatively, use a 410 status code to speed up their removal from Google index.
5. Ignoring Internal Links – Removing or updating content without addressing internal links can lead to broken links, which negatively affect user experience and crawlability. Internal links are crucial for passing link equity and helping Google understand the structure of your site.
6. Removing Content Without Considering External Links – Some content might not bring in traffic but still attract external backlinks. Deleting such content can lead to a loss in link equity, which can impact your site’s authority and rankings.
7. Overlooking Content Consolidation Opportunities – Instead of deleting low-performing content, look for opportunities to merge it with related, high-performing content. This can improve the overall quality and relevance of the content, making it more valuable to both users and search engines.
8. Focusing Only on Traffic Metrics – Traffic is important, but it’s not the only metric that matters. Content that supports brand identity, answers niche queries, or contributes to conversions should also be considered, even if it doesn’t generate high traffic.
9. Not Updating or Improving Remaining Content – Content pruning is not just about removal; it’s also about updating and improving what’s left. Ignoring the need for refreshing or expanding existing content can result in missed opportunities to boost rankings and engagement.
10. Failing to Monitor the Impact – After pruning content, it’s crucial to monitor the impact on key metrics like rankings, traffic, and user engagement. Failing to do so means you might not catch any negative consequences early enough to mitigate them.

Conclusion – “Content Pruning” has proven to be an effective strategy and one of the best SEO tactics in recent times. If planned and executed well, it can lead to significant improvements in organic performance. By removing low-performing pages, we ensure Google focuses on the content that truly matters. This approach not only helps Google better understand and rank your website but also makes your website more helpful and user-friendly. Consider integrating content pruning into your broader SEO strategy. It’s a great way to enhance your website’s effectiveness and significantly improve your rankings. 

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