Why & How Content Pruning Helps Your SEO

Why & How Content Pruning Helps Your SEO

Today, users’ attention spans are reducing day by day. It’s now a proven fact that if the first two to three seconds of your content don’t captivate readers, you are doing something terribly wrong. Be it website content or blog posts, your content must grab the attention of readers at their first sight.

There is huge business competition all around, where each brand wants to outwit the others, and interestingly, all of them are trying to reach the same target audience. Obviously, the brand that continues to woo the audience and maintains a strong and consistent online presence with clear messaging will eventually succeed.

In such a situation, content pruning can be an effective strategy through which brands can not only establish their authority in the market but also enhance their credibility and have a standout presence in front of their target audience. Before moving forward, it’s essential to first understand the meaning of content pruning.

What Is Content Pruning?

Over the last few years, content pruning has emerged as a key strategy for brands to optimize their website content. Well, it’s not something alien to content strategists. Content pruning is all about making your website more relevant than ever to users and readers.

Content pruning starts with the removal of outdated and obsolete content, which doesn’t serve any real purpose.

Keeping even five-year-old data or statistics on your website or retaining details about products that you no longer produce or sell serves no purpose.

It’s better to remove such content from your website. It can include duplicate web pages or blog posts focused on the same set of keywords.

After completing the content pruning process, your website will look much more concise and clearer, while enhancing the user experience on your site and improving your search engine rankings as well.

How Does Content Pruning Improve Your Site’s SEO Performance?

Increase Conversion and Sales: With content pruning, you are ensuring that users are getting what they actually want to see. It should also align with their intent or queries about the products or services on offer.

Effective content pruning may not just help your user find relevant information quickly, but it will also make them more eager to buy from you.

The faster the response, the less time there is for customers to bounce back from your site and move to the next.

For instance, underperforming landing pages need to be rewritten and optimized. You must optimize them according to customers’ needs to encourage positive action.

Enhances Your Search Engine Rankings: With better flow and structuring of content, your SERP rankings can get a boost. Thus, content pruning improves your visibility and makes it easier for Google crawlers to pick your site content for the top of its pages.

As a rule of thumb, high-quality SEO content is always likely to be posted at the top of SERPs, resulting in more traffic and leads to your site. The more relevant, up-to-date, and well-explained content you put on your website, the more authoritative your site will appear.

Google and Bing follow a crawl-centric approach when displaying results for a particular keyword. Your website will likely be ignored by Google crawlers or bots if the site doesn’t have relevant and updated content.

With content pruning, you can make the crawling process smoother for search engines, and thus you are likely to garner better responses.

Smart User Experience for Visitors: Obsolete content is not just unwanted but can distract visitors from your site. Scrolling through a site and not getting what you want can be irritating. Usually, in such a case, they will not only move to a competitor’s site but may also end up buying their product or services from the latter, causing a business loss to you.

Decrease Any Chance of Keyword Cannibalization: No brand ever wants to deal with keyword cannibalization. In simple terms, keyword cannibalization means various pages of your site start ranking for the same keywords.

It not only affects your SEO ranking but also wastes the efforts you’ve put in over the years.

You can effectively solve this issue with the help of content pruning, ensuring that your targeted web pages, which you wish to rank high on search engine pages, have a different set of keywords.

Should Every Brand Implement a Content Pruning Strategy?

Yes. As business competition increases, content pruning will become indispensable. Even now, many businesses are implementing it, but unfortunately, many businesses are unaware of it.

If you are in doubt about whether you should opt for content pruning, here’s a checklist:

*You haven’t updated your website in the last 3 years.
*Your blog posts contain details that are no longer relevant.
*Your website traffic is constantly going down.
*Google Search Console doesn’t show too many pages with high impressions.
*Your website has received penalties from Google in recent times.

If any of the above applies to you, you must go for content pruning.

Content Pruning: A Brief Guideline

Go for A Professional Content Audit: Get your website content audited at least once every six months. You need someone who has expertise in handling tools like SEMrush, Google Analytics 4, and Search Console. Based on their data and feedback, you should go ahead with your content pruning.

Know Your Obsolete Content: No matter how much hard work your content team has put in, after a certain time, some content may not be relevant to your target audience.
It’s better to get such content optimized, deleted, or rewritten. If it sounds overwhelming, you may choose to first specifically target the web pages that are poorly performing now.

Content Optimization: The most logical step you should take after analyzing your underperforming pages is to get all outdated content pruned, removed, or decluttered.

Get them replaced with newer and more interesting content. Don’t worry about broken links—just redirect them with 301 redirects. A technical expert can handle this better.

Keep a Tab on Results: The end goal of every activity is the result. After a thorough content pruning, you need to analyze the outcomes.

Of course, you will have to stay calm and patient. Keep tracking your traffic and data for the next two months.

If you start seeing positive results, it means your content pruning was done correctly.

But don’t lose heart if you don’t see much improvement in traffic—it means you have to work harder and re-examine your site content, making sure all irrelevant and outdated web pages are appropriately removed.

1)Expected Outcomes of Content Pruning
2) Better search engine rankings.
3) More user interest in your site.
4) Enhanced page loading speed.
5) Focused content that users love.

Conclusion

Content pruning is a crucial SEO practice for brands looking to establish their long-term presence in the market. With careful implementation of content pruning, your site not only gets a rejuvenated look but can also improve its overall lead generation and ROI capability.

Don’t make it a once-in-a-while activity—content pruning should be practiced frequently, regardless of your line of business. Want to take your SEO game to a new level? Look no further. Contact us today and we’ll guide you with a compelling content plan that delivers results.

Atish Home Chowdhury

Editor Admin

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