While it is important to constantly be thinking about creating new content for your website and blog, you also need to heed some mind for your existing content.
In this article, we’re going to talk about content pruning; what is it and just how effective is it in SEO?
What is content pruning?
Content pruning falls under the content maintenance bracket. Simply put, it refers to the process of removing content that isn’t performing so well:
- Low traffic content.
- Low converting content.
- Duplicate content.
- Thin content.
- Irrelevant content.
It’s no different than pruning a Bonsai tree; it’s all about cutting away the dead or dying branches that are otherwise hindering the tree’s potential. What’s left is fresh, rich, and highly relevant content that your website visitors love to engage with.
Why is pruning content so important? Is it good for SEO?
Pruning content is all about putting your best foot forward and doing away with anything that might be holding you back. In doing so you improve the overall quality of the content on your website which can lead to higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages). But, there’s much more to it than that:
- User-experience: when you have a commitment to quality content and frequently cut away the shabby stuff, you will be actively improving the overall user-experience on your website. This is not only great for your customers, but it also sends the right signals to Google as well.
- It’s economic: old content is frequently crawled by Google and every time this happens energy and resources are used. If you have old content that is no longer relevant or useful to your customers, pruning it away saves Google time and effort – which makes a difference.
- Reduce content cannibalisation: content cannibalisation is when you have multiple pages and blog posts that each have similar focus keywords and cover very similar subjects. Once your website exceeds a certain size this will likely occur more frequently. As a result, Google gets confused and doesn’t quite know which pages to rank with priority. You can prevent this and ensure that only the most important content gets the lime-light by pruning the rest away accordingly.
- Tidy as you go: think of it like a pile of dishes that keeps getting bigger and bigger. With every dish that’s added to the plate, the eventual task of having to wash them becomes even more unbearable! If you prune your content as you go, you’ll never have to worry about the proverbial pile getting too big.
Conclusion: Get those pruning shears ready!
When was the last time you took the pruning shears to your website? Do you think there’s some old content that could use snipping away?
If you don’t even know where to begin or would struggle to identify which pages are holding you back, we recommend hiring the professionals.
This digital marketing agency in Singapore has helped thousands of businesses grow online and some light pruning on your website would be a great place to start!
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