Content Pruning: Removing Pages to Boost Traffic

Your content dead weight is content that is no longer useful, or has lost its value. Maybe it even includes harmful advise. Content you can prune includes: 

• Pages that include outdated information
• Pages that are not getting website traffic 
• Pages that lack user engagement
• Duplicate content pages
• Pages containing thin content

Three Steps to Content Pruning

Content pruning helps to clean up your content that could be harming your SEO efforts due to low quality, while reorganising your content, making it easier to rank and increase organic traffic. This involves a three step process:

1. Identify pages that are negatively impacting your SEO efforts
2. Identify content gaps based on your consumers journey, seeing what content you have, reworking it into areas of your funnel
3. Ensure you redirect users that arrive on deleted content to new content without sending customers to broken pages or losing valuable link equity

Why Content Pruning is Important to Boost Website Traffic

Content pruning can help you improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), thereby increasing your web traffic. Content pruning is an important part of SEO because:

• It improves quality – pruning content that doesn't provide value, can increase your content overall quality score
• It improves the distribution of link authority – when you remove pages with no or little value, you ensure your link authority flows to pages with potential 
• It improves user experience (UX) – search engines are focusing on user experiences, which is why when you prune content, you ensure you provide your users with the best quality, relevant, and accurate content that resonates with them
• It improves crawl budget spending – you want search engine crawlers to spend your crawl budget on pages that have potential to boost website traffic

How Often Should Your Content be Pruned?

Content pruning should be done consistently. Ideally, you want to place it in your list of monthly SEO tasks. At Genie Crawl, we recommend regular content pruning, rather than doing a massive prune once or twice annually.  Assess what content you can prune every six months if your website has less than one thousand pages.

The Process of Content Pruning

Content pruning involves a three step process, that includes:

1. Content inventory – create an overview of all your content 
2. Audit – evaluate the performance of each piece of content 
3. Pruning – decide what content should be pruned, focus on more options than removing it.

Conclusion

While you are probably focused on creating new and fresh content, removing outdated and non-valuable content can improve your website traffic. Content pruning is an effective way to eradicate any dead weight, focusing your attention on the content that has the best potential. If you need help with content pruning, contact the Genie Crawl team now to find out more.