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Grow your business quickly with paid search (SEA).
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SEO Agency
SEA Agency
Grow your business quickly with paid search (SEA).
Social ads
The agency
Content Pruning is the process of removing, consolidating, or refreshing underperforming content that prevents a website from growing. Pruning content optimises existing content and creates room for fresh, new, high-quality content, improving the overall performance of a website and search engine rankings.
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Google Search prioritises user experience, making quality content crucial to a successful website. Google has continuously shifted its ranking systems toward content that appeals to the user experience rather than highly indexed websites. The introduction of the Google “helpful content” update specifically rewards user-focused expertise and informational content. Having outdated information, poor quality content or duplicate content can have a negative effect on a website’s visibility and search engine rankings.
The solution to this is Content Pruning, effectively ‘tidying up’ the website, removing redundant pages and creating a space for new content to thrive. As sites continuously review and add high-quality content, they will build trust with Google and other search engines, leading to a boost in their SERP ranking.
Content pruning is essential as it realigns the website with the elements it needs to improve both its user experience and search engine optimisation(SEO). In order to optimise a website, it should prioritise qualitative, relevant and fresh content. If there is a large amount of poor-quality content, it can negatively impact the websites’s ranking and its performance will suffer. It’s important to analyse the content on each page and highlight any outdated or redundant information. In order to retain a high ranking or increase ranking, content must be continuously reviewed and updated. Below are some of the benefits of content pruning and why it should be considered essential for any firm.
Organic traffic refers to the number of users you receive through unpaid search engine results. It is essential to SEO strategy and is a strong indicator of content quality. Increasing the level of organic traffic is crucial in improving visibility and search engine ranking status.
The presence of thin content, such as pages with little to no valuable information, will contribute to declining ranking and drive a drop in organic traffic. Removing thin content through pruning can strengthen a page’s overall performance, improve its visibility, and will in turn see an increase in organic traffic.
Users want websites to provide useful and up-to-date information. It’s important to have an easy-to-navigate website with pages where users can easily find the information they are looking for. It’s also important for the pages to consistently match the user’s search intent. When content is relevant and engaging, it will improve user satisfaction. Search engines also aim to prioritise this. Google wants the most helpful information displayed highest. Therefore, if the information is not accessible to the user, it will rank lower.
Pruning the outdated and unhelpful information can help websites to strengthen their authority with Google and strive to improve their ranking. Additionally, removing unnecessary pages or merging information from pages will help the website rank higher. Strong pages that effectively address the user’s search intent are more visible and can be more effective than having multiple pages.
Google uses bots to crawl pages every day in order to analyse the content of a website. The number of pages it chooses to crawl at a time is referred to as the crawl budget. How often the bots crawl a site depends on several factors. This can due to the size of the website, loading speed of the page or quality of the content, essentially it depends on the quality of the page. On big websites, it’s possible that not all pages will get crawled. Having an efficient crawl budget is vital for increasing a websites’ visibility. The greater the crawl budget of a site, the more Google trusts your content, the higher the chances of ranking in the top search results.
If the crawlers are crawling a large amount of unnecessary pages, there is less time being spent on important content. By pruning content, you are removing broken pages, low quality pages and improving the technical aspects of page like decreasing loading times. When a website has higher quality content it will encourage crawlers to take time on the site. This increases the likelihood of the website’s important pages getting crawled, gaining more trust and therefore boosting its search engine rankings.
This can be assessed using tools such as Google Search Console to see how many unindexed pages are being crawled. Pruning then allows you to remove this unnecessary and useless content and redirect crawlers back to the important pages.
Knowing what content to prune is just as important as the pruning process itself. It’s important to make a full evaluation and decide what content needs to be revised or removed. Underperforming content is content that receives no traffic, fails to obtain conversions, or content that is no longer relevant or effective at achieving a high ranking on search engines.
Google has continuously implemented algorithms to try and crack down on poor content quality. Having thin or low-value content can seriously impact a website’s entire ranking, not only those pages.
The “helpful content” algorithm specifically targets information which is purely trying to rank high in the search ranking and not actually providing useful information.
The EEAT, an acronym standing for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is a framework Google uses to assess content quality. They want to know:
It’s important that Google believes your content is valuable to the user, therefore there are some indicators that can suggest that your content is underperforming and should be optimised.
A page with low overall traffic is an indicator that audiences are not interested in the content, and it should be assessed whether the page is necessary for the website. The page is not receiving any clicks despite marketing efforts, paid ads and optimising content. It’s important to assess the relevance of the page and whether it still targets the audience. If a page does have a higher overall traffic, but low conversion rate this can indicate that there is interest, however the content could be optimised to have a stronger effect and encourage conversions.
If sites are similar and are targeting the same keywords and audience, they are essentially competing with each other and diluting each others ranking. It is better to have one strong page with all the helpful information targeting the user, rather than three or four pages using the same keywords.
Outdated information is information that is no longer relevant, reflects trends that have changed or has not been updated for a long period of time. URLs can also indicate when content is outdated, for example when a specific year is included, this essentially gives the page an expiry date and flags to Google that the page is not supplying the most relevant information. How often you update information depends on the type of content being produced. However, it is important that all pages contain relevant and up-to-date information.
All of this content can be identified using tools such as Google Search Console and Screaming Frog during the pruning process, which will identify the pages that have a high performance and those that are negatively affecting overall performance. The pruning process will filter out the low-value content and improve the overall SEO performance.
Before starting the content pruning process, it is crucial to do a full content audit of all the pages on the website. This audit will outline which pages are doing well and those that are underperforming. Below is a complete tutorial for effective content pruning.
Start by creating a comprehensive list of each URL on the website. You can do this by making a spreadsheet where you can effectively organise which content is working and which ones need to be pruned after analysing. You can use specific tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to pull the data you need from each URL.
Use tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics to get a complete overview of all indexed URLs. They will provide the data for:
Google Search can also be used to get metrics such as dates for when content was published. Additionally, you can also use crawling tools such as screaming frog which will crawl your website, identifying duplicate content and assess backlinks including their sources and quality.
The most crucial part of the Pruning process. You need to know which URLs need attention before proceeding. You should analyse the URLs based on the metrics discussed above:
Classify content based on performance. Pages that performs poorly with these metrics such as pages with low traffic, should be flagged as potential pruning content. This assessment will show how many clicks each page is getting, which pages are thriving, and which pages need to be improved or evaluated. The content that is harming the website the most should be isolated and pruned.
After content has been isolated, there are a few options to consider.
After pruning, the solution is not always that content should be removed, sometimes it just needs to be improved or redirected to other content. Once all the content has been identified, it should then be decided whether the content should be:
Content that has slightly dropped in ranking but still has potential and interest, i.e. The topic is still relevant, and it still has high impressions. This content should be optimised with new, more relevant content.
Some methods to refresh existing content:
More information on how to optimise content can be found in our SEO guide.
If articles experience keyword cannibalisation i.e. they aim to convey the same keyword or search intent, they should be merged to create one piece of effective content using the best performing URL. This will remove the keyword cannibalisation from the website and instead create a much stronger piece of content, merging the best content from both articles. All older URLs should then be redirected to the main one.
This is where content is removed entirely from the website as it is no longer serving the purpose of the firm. The content is of low quality and outdated, doesn’t attract traffic and is no longer in line with the SEO strategy. It should therefore be removed and create space for new content.
The most common choice for removing content is a 301 link, which is a permanent redirect of the URL to similar or updated pages. It’s important to choose a redirect target that matches the search intent. Also, if there are internal links on other pages, it’s important to update them as this will lead to broken pages. Pages useful to users but not necessary for search engines can also be unindexed.
After completing the pruning process, the metrics should be reevaluated to see whether:
The impact of the pruning process can be illustrated in this case study where after completing a comprehensive audit of content, it was decided to remove or merge content that was:
The initial impact of removing or consolidating 23% of the site’s content led to an 16% increase in organic traffic immediately. More information about the study can be found here.
Pruning is a very effective way to improve the ranking of a site on the SERP, but it can come with risks. It’s important to take care that valuable content such as pages that provide context for other high-performing pages is not removed. It can also be risky if removing pages also removes important backlinks.
It’s important to not eliminate pages that provide context or support for high-performing pages. You should also ensure not to eliminate long tail keywords that have low traffic, but a high conversion rate. Sometimes it’s not worth saving a small amount of crawl budget and losing a stable consumer base as long tail keywords generally attract specific customers ready to buy. If conversion occurs even at a small level, it’s worth keeping the page.
Be careful when removing pages that there are no quality backlinks from other sources that could be severed. If a backlink is strong, removing it can negatively impact the ranking. Using crawler tools like Screaming Frog can assess what backlinks are present and whether they are strong or weak.
Content Pruning should be done on a frequent basis. The first initial prune will remove the bulk of underperforming content. However to maintain efficiency, content should be pruned regularly.
Depending on the size of the business, content pruning should occur once or twice a year. Removing outdated content and consistently refreshing existing content will ensure that the highest value content is being presented to the user at all times.
Algorithms along with consumer needs are constantly changing therefore consistent refreshing of content is needed to maintain top search result rankings.
SERP
H1 Tag
trust flow
seo data
popularity index
link juice
alt attribute
semantic cocoon
meta description
internal mesh
robots.txt
duplicate content
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