How Does Content Pruning Help to Boost Your Website’s SEO?

If you have ever dirtied your hands in a garden, you’d know that the whole point of pruning is to do away with old, drooping stems to make way for new ones and stimulating growth. Websites are not so different in this regard. Pruning is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Getting rid of old, useless content can uncover stuff people are interested in, and it also makes space for new content creation.

What is Content Pruning?

It involves identifying pages that no longer provide relevance and removing these low-value pages from your website. How can you figure out what can be termed as low-value content? Here are some questions you can ask.

1. Does the page get a reasonable amount of traffic or drive conversions?

2. Does it have valuable backlinks that are boosting your site’s domain authority?

3. Does the content answer a question or provide intellectual value?

4. Does the page encourage visitors to stay on your site?

Here’s an example- The SEO lead of QuickBooks, Will Waggoner, deleted 2,000 blog posts in response to a slow decline in organic traffic. That’s more than 40% QuickBooks Resource Centre, a product of thousands of dollars investment and endless hours of writing. Unbelievably, traffic was up by 20% within a few weeks, and it shot up to 44% by peak season, contributing to a 72% increase in sign-ups due to extra traffic. Seems like a simple move? Quality content marketing services can devise the perfect strategy that works for your business.

How can Content Pruning help?

• Improved CTR: People tend to gravitate towards the most recent content. So when you update your site’s content, the most immediate effect will be reflected in the Click Through Rate or CTR of the search engine results page since people prefer to know the latest information.

• Better Ranking: By updating an old piece of content, your search position will improve as well. The change can be a result of triggering several ranking factors. Anything that’s not recent news or latest trends, content freshness would be the apparent factor. But an improvement in content quality and increase in user behavior signals like clicks, comments and shares can also be part of the reason for the change.

• Minimal Efforts: There is not much to do to update and republish the content of old pages. The research is already done, the structure is fixed, and most of it remains unchanged. The time taken to refresh four old pages is equivalent to the one needed to create a new page from scratch. Along with being a huge time-saver, the updated pages will be equally popular as the new ones.

• Additional Value: Creating a new page is an intensive process, one that demands time and resources. However, updating old pages allows more time for considering your options for the extra value you can add to make it better. Comprehensive digital marketing services offer content marketing strategies and optimize your website for search rankings so that you can focus on your business. Competitor pages with impressive outputs may have gone through multiple iterations and took many years to display what you see today. This shows the merit of updating old pages and upgrading their value.

If you are looking for the right digital marketing agency that can successfully optimize your site and prune its content to boost traffic and improve SEO, you can get in touch with us.