In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Google came up with an update on May 4, 2020, which was the second core update of the year.
What is Content Pruning? How can it Drive Quality Traffic?
Content pruning is about weeding out the obsolete content and polishing the site with new ones.
Content pruning can work wonders for your search engine optimization techniques!
Do you know why we decided to talk about content pruning today?
Let us tell you — what led us to talk about the topic.
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Google came up with an update on May 4, 2020. Google came up with another core algorithm update, which was the second core update of the year.
Google Core Updates stated:
“They’re designed to ensure that overall, we’re delivering on our mission to present relevant and authoritative content to searchers.”
During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the search behavior has been extraordinarily affected. The segments that are most often seen as an upswing are healthcare, media, food, and finance. And, sectors like transportation and travel saw some major drop.
The Google core algorithm update was all about its constant emphasis on the quality of content & freshness.
This is why we are talking about Content Pruning.
Based on this latest Google update, your content will struggle to rank organically on the SERP, therefore it is important to cut the crap and remove the outdated information from the website.
This is the perfect time when you should prune the old blogs, announcements & any useless content. It is time you should put over content that Search Engines can make sense of and add some real value to the site.
Here’s when Content pruning comes into the picture. So, without any further ado, let’s talk about content pruning in detail.
What Is Content Pruning?
The process of removing the obsolete and unimportant content from the website that is not adding any value to the business is called content pruning. It’s also the consolidation of content, and so that it is not indexed by the search engine.
Content pruning is often compared to pruning a tree, which is done for healthy growth and to withhold the structural strength of the tree. Gardeners more often prune trees to protect them from any kind of decay or death.
Content pruning is done by identifying the low quality, obsolete and underperforming content and removing them from the site. It will unclutter and shed light on the newer & useful content that makes sense for your audience.
How Regular Pruning Can Help Your Business?
What is your focus? For whom you are constantly making efforts to create content? Obviously, you are hiring writers & SEO experts to keep your audience engaged with your content.
With content pruning, you can keep your website clean & inundated with only relevant content. It’s where you can remove outdated & irrelevant content. This cleaning up gives greater exposure, keeping it far more relevant.
Content Pruning takes care of your content:
Relevancy.
Quality over quantity.
With low-quality content on your site, it won’t do anything better than just creating clutter. This bunch of irrelevant content offers more & more pages for Google to crawl & index, which leads to many pages getting left and are never actually visited by Google and is never linked. In nutshell, this outdated content won’t have any value to the site or the audience.
Regular Content Pruning.
Being a regular fixture when it’s about content pruning will not do!
When we talk about content pruning, we do not mean just a one-and-done cleaning event. It has to be a continuous process of cleaning. And, it has to be an ongoing process!
Most businesses do not pay heed to clean outdated content from the site, which leads to lowering their site’s ranking.
To keep improving impressions & clicks, you’ll need a regular remover of outdated content from the site on a bi-annual basis. Moreover, if you have more than a thousand pages on the site, you must go for content pruning every three, or four months.
If you have not done content pruning in the last few years, you must start with a large prune. After a large annual pruning, you can switch to cleaning it up after six months.
Content pruning and getting rid of the outdated content is — one of the most efficient strategies of Search engine optimization. Before initiating a cleaning up session, you must understand the analytics data to analyze where the cleanup fits up in the workflow.
How to Administer content pruning?
Here’s a step-by-step detailed process of content pruning. This process will help you with keeping your site clean & up-to-date.
Step 1: Know what is to be Audited.
Before beginning with the audit process, you must know precisely which section of the site should be chopped off and which should not. There are sets of content that can attract a huge audience, and they should remain.
However, you must certainly add some new stats, tips, and more important information. But, other than that, there could be non-performing & low-quality content that you are not aware of. You must do a close inspection of pages that are already indexed & which must be evaluated.
Step 2: Look for pages that underperform.
Once you have begun with the process of content pruning, you need to check out for the pages that are no longer providing any value to your site. Take note of all these pages and know clearly which pages are bogging down your site.
Know which pages are getting a fewer click and which still inundate your site with quality traffic. You have to be extremely precise and go through each piece of content on the site.
Step 3: understand backlinks & traffic.
The third step on your way to content pruning must be a real analysis of the traffic & the backlinks. Assuming as to which pages are performing and which pages are underperforming.
You should use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or any other analytics software to obtain the metrics. In general, if a piece of content has not performed for a year or two, it must be removed from the site.
Step 4: Whether to Improve or remove a post.
When you have finally figured out, what pieces of the content are underperforming — you must decide whether you must remove them or there is a scope to improve it.
There are two options:
- Remove it completely
- Improves the underperforming piece of content.
It will depend on the performance stats — whether it is worth updated or should be cleaned up. However, the better way is always to repurpose and update the content than to start it all from scratch. But, again this should absolutely be a decision of your team, and how they want to proceed.
In some cases, it would always be better to write a more updated content than repurposing the older content.
Takeaways:
Content pruning should be considered a part of your Digital Marketing effort, and it must not be considered solely an effort to remove the outdated content. You must consider strategic content pruning and follow the following important steps:
Administer a regular content audit
Create an inventory of non-performing content
Put these content into different categories by the topics.
Use different relevant metrics to identify low-performing content.
Use a non-index tag to remove low-value content.
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