What is content pruning in SEO and why should you do it?

What is content pruning?

We can think of content pruning a bit like giving your website a much-needed spring clean. It involves identifying content that no longer serves a purpose and making the decision to get rid of it, consolidate it, or update it.

The idea behind it is that we want to make sure all of your website’s content is relevant, useful and aligned with your SEO goals. It’s more important than ever if we think about Google’s Helpful Content Update which prioritises websites that tick all those boxes.

Good SEO in 2024 and beyond is all centred around creating original, helpful, high-quality content that is genuinely written by people for people. So, say you have hundreds of blog posts that date back years there’s a good chance that some of these were written purely with SEO in mind. Back then, that likely contributed to your strategy – but how are they doing for you now?

Content pruning, when done right, helps keep your content fresh and makes sure it’s providing value to both users and search engines. However, that’s not to say that you should start removing all of your content and starting again – there’s a process behind it, which we’ll talk about in-depth later on in this blog.

Why content pruning matters

Websites can quickly become overloaded with content, especially if they’ve been around for a while and you’ve been active with your SEO strategy. We’ve had a lot of firsthand experience with this – clients approaching us with a website that’s had years of SEO work from different agencies who haven’t actually considered what content already exists before adding to it.

So, now we know that it’s not a good idea to swamp your website with too much content, but why? Well, it can lead to a whole host of issues such as:

1. Content bloat

Continuously adding new content without managing older content can cause a website to become bloated with irrelevant, redundant, or low-quality pages. This means your valuable content can easily get buried amongst all this noise, making it difficult for both users and search engines to find.

Every page or post you publish on a website adds to its sitemap. If this sitemap starts to get cluttered with useless content it can make it difficult for search engines to not only crawl but to identify your most important content. And when we’ve got key pages we want Google to prioritise, this could be hindering our progress.

2. Keyword cannibalisation

Naturally, your website will have a niche whether that’s the industry you’re working in or the services you provide and most of the content you create will be focused on similar topics for that reason. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with this, if you’ve not carefully considered the keywords that each piece of content is targeting then you risk harming your own SEO efforts.

Publishing multiple pieces targeting similar topics or keywords puts you at risk of keyword cannibalisation – where two or more pages on your site compete for the same terms. This can confuse search engines and will usually mean that none of them will rank well for that keyword, diluting your SEO strategy and harming your traffic potential.

3. Outdated information

If you’re working in a fast-changing industry where trends and topics are ever-evolving, like SEO, then your content can become outdated pretty quickly. There will always be someone else out there posting the latest updates and if you’re not quick to bring your content up to date in line with the changes, you’ll get left behind.

Too much old and outdated content on your site can harm your credibility and trustworthiness, and over time this can negatively impact your user engagement metrics and ultimately drive your rankings down.

4. Slow page speed

Many other factors outside of content affect your SEO performance, a key one being how quickly your website loads. Page speed is vital for ensuring a good user experience but the more content you have, the heavier your website becomes which can lead to slower load times.

Not only does this frustrate users and potentially lead to higher bounce rates and lower engagement but it can also hurt your Core Web Vitals and ultimately your SEO performance. A clean and tidy website is a happy website.

5. Reduced crawl efficiency

We briefly touched on this in the first point, but it’s worth exploring what the big deal is with optimising your sitemap.

Search engines like Google have a limited crawl budget – the number of pages they’ll crawl and index on your site in a specific period. If your site is cluttered with unnecessary content, search engines may waste time crawling those pages and potentially overlook your most important or updated content. This means your budget might run out before they can crawl these pages, and you might struggle to get your new content indexed.

When it’s time to clean up your website’s content

So, when should you start pruning your content? A simple answer to this question is if you’ve never done it before, now is the time to.

How cluttered your website is will depend entirely on how much content has been piling up and how often you’ve updated it. But, there are some telltale signs that this content might not be working for you anymore.

1. Your bounce rates are high

If users are landing on your site and leaving almost immediately, this could be a red flag that something’s wrong. Maybe they’re struggling to find the content they want, maybe it’s not answering their questions or maybe it’s simply just outdated and irrelevant.

Either way, a spike in your bounce rates means there’s some further investigation needed.

2. You’ve seen a drop in traffic

Noticed a decline in organic traffic? Whether it’s plummeted or plateaued, it’s a dead giveaway that your content is no longer serving its purpose.

Search engines love fresh, relevant and valuable content, so a drop in your site traffic may indicate that your content just isn’t quite that. It might be that your once high-performing content isn’t seen as helpful anymore, so it could be time to refresh it and start driving that traffic again.

3. Your content isn’t true

There’s a lot of misinformation out there online and you don’t want to be one of those websites contributing to that. If your content is full of outdated advice, trends or statistics, you’re likely serving incorrect information to visitors which can harm your credibility and trustworthiness.

4. Your content is on the thin side

Have you had a bad habit of publishing pages for the sake of it? Are these pages barely scratching the surface of the topic you’re talking about? Pages with little substance or value are what we’d refer to as thin content and that’s not going to rank well.

Pruning this type of content is a great chance to figure out if you can add more valuable information to it, consolidate it with other pages that offer more, or just get rid of it altogether.

5. You’re not seeing any conversions

It’s all well and good having decent rankings and pulling in traffic to your content, but if that content isn’t driving users towards a goal – whether signing up for your newsletter, filling out a form, or making a purchase – is it really worthwhile?

You’ve invested time and effort into your content so you need it to work for you. Analysing what it is and isn’t doing for you will open up the door to better optimisation opportunities, even if that’s tweaking the wording or adjusting your messaging to align better with your current goals.

6. Your sitemap is a mess

It’s important to understand what your sitemap looks like as this is what search engines will see when crawling your site. Use a tool such as Screaming Frog to get a full list of your pages – does it look overwhelming to you? Are you seeing pages you didn’t even know you had? If so, it’s time to clean it up.

How to perform an SEO content audit

Before we can start pruning, we first need to understand what your content looks like and how it’s performing – the most effective way to do this is through a content audit. This might sound like a daunting task, but stick with it and it’ll be one of the most valuable SEO exercises you can do.

1. Set clear goals

First things first, we need to know what we’re trying to achieve so we can assess each piece of content with purpose. This could be anything along the lines of:

• I want to increase my rankings
• I want to drive more traffic
• I want to improve user engagement
• I want to improve my conversion rate
• I want to avoid keyword cannibalisation

2. Gather all of your content

Compile a list of all the content on your website (maybe use the Screaming Frog crawl from earlier). This can include blog posts, landing pages, product pages, resources, guides, FAQs or any other content you deem valuable to the task.

Then, create a spreadsheet to track each piece of content and include the following key information:

• URL
• Title
• Date published (or last updated)
• Word count
• Organic traffic metrics (sessions, page views, bounce rate)
• User engagement data
• Backlinks
• Conversion rate (if applicable)

It’s also worth noting down key pieces of SEO information such as target keyword, page title, H1 and meta description so we can cross reference this against all similar pages.

3. Assess the performance of your content

Once we’ve gathered all the data, we need to analyse how each page is performing against the goals we set out in the first step. Some of the key metrics to consider are:

• How much traffic is this piece of content getting? Has it declined over time?
• What does user engagement look like? Are users sticking around or bouncing off the page?
• Is this content ranking well for relevant keywords?
• Does this content have any good-quality backlinks?
• Is this content generating any conversions?
• Is this content still relevant? Does it provide up-to-date information or is it outdated?

In your spreadsheet, tag each one according to the results of your analysis:

• Keep: High-performing, valuable content that’s still relevant
• Update: Content that has potential but still needs a refresh
• Consolidate: Multiple pieces of content that cover the same topic and can be merged into one better piece
• Remove: Any content that’s irrelevant, outdated, or underperforming and isn’t worth trying to improve it

4. Take action

Now that you have a defined list of all the content on your website that needs some attention, it’s a good idea to prioritise them in terms of what’s more important.

If you have a lot of pages that need to be deleted, it might be wise to tick those off first as it’s quick, easy, and pretty straightforward – just don’t forget to redirect them elsewhere!

Refreshing content or consolidating pages may take a while longer, so it makes sense to work on the ones that will get you more bang for your buck i.e. where the content desperately needs updating or where you might be able to drive the most traffic.

As you update or consolidate content, use this as the perfect opportunity to optimise for SEO. Here are a few key tips to do this effectively:

• Refresh your keywords: Make sure each piece of content targets relevant keywords that align with your goals and target users’ search needs
• Improve on-page SEO: Ensure all headings are optimised, refresh page titles & meta descriptions, check all images have alt tags and add internal links where appropriate
• Enhance user experience: Think about how the page looks and performs, is it easy to read? Break up long blocks of text with images, subheadings and bullet points to make the content easier to navigate, and check the page load speed

5. Monitor and iterate

A content audit isn’t a one-and-done process, in fact, it’s something that you should continue to do regularly to ensure that your content is serving your audience and your goals. The perfect frequency for this? We’d say at least annually, but ideally quarterly if you have the time and resources.

You’ll want to keep track of your progress by regularly monitoring your metrics to track any improvements in traffic, rankings, user engagement and conversions. It may be the case that you need to make even more tweaks to boost your performance but there’s no limit to how many times you can refresh your content!

What next? Building a new content strategy

A bit like a spring clean, content pruning offers the perfect opportunity to start afresh. With everything clean and optimised, we can now start looking at a new content strategy moving forward.

You’ll already have a good idea of your key topics, keywords and any content gaps you might have which can be used to build a new content strategy around. Remember to focus on the goals you lay out during the content audit process to develop a new strategy that aligns with what you want to achieve.

Need help crafting the perfect content strategy? Pixel Kicks’ team of SEO experts can help. Get in touch with us to find out more or check out our latest SEO case studies to see how we’ve helped our clients.