Business Benefits
Provide better value for your target audience and improve SERP rankings.
Look for underperforming pages, thin content, and outdated information.
Low-quality or outdated content doesn’t provide much value in satisfying searcher intent. It can also negatively impact your website’s SEO performance. Even a few pieces of outdated content can reduce the overall authority and trustworthiness of your website. This may, in turn, cause a drop in your site’s search rankings and web traffic.
For example, if you have a blog post that still references the Musical.ly app, and the post received a high amount of page views in the past, it’s likely that you can update the post. You may mention the app’s merger with TikTok and talk about the new features that came with the app’s rebranding.
Determine how often you and your team should prune your content, depending on the time sensitivity of your posts. Quarterly or biannual reviews are often suitable.
If you tend to publish more evergreen content, then pruning your content twice a year may be sufficient. If your content regularly references time-sensitive events in your industry, it may be worthwhile to prune your content more often. This ensures that outdated content isn’t negatively impacting your search engine rankings.
Use a content inventory spreadsheet to track your content. Include content title, type, assets, URL, linked sources, date published, and date last updated.
Consider keeping this inventory on a shareable cloud-based platform like Google Drive to make it easily accessible for your team.
Review your analytics to pull data such as clicks, website traffic, and bounce rate for each piece of content.
To derive important insights, use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Adobe Analytics. Additionally, use a tool like Google Search Console to see search rankings for each web page.
Create a duplicate of your content inventory spreadsheet and add new columns to track performance metrics.
This allows you to identify low-quality or underperforming content.
For example, rename your duplicate spreadsheet to something like Content Pruning: [Month] [Year] and add new columns to the sheet to track Clicks, Page Views, Bounce Rate, and Search Ranking for each piece of content. Populate the appropriate fields with the data you pulled from your analytics reports.
Determine which underperforming pieces of content can be updated, and remove outdated pages that no longer serve a purpose to your audience.
Use your experience and best judgment to determine whether a piece of content may be salvageable. In some cases, refreshing the page’s linked sources and correcting details may be enough to make the piece of content relevant again. In other cases, the content may no longer fit within your overall marketing strategy. So, removing it from your site may be the best solution.
Continue using your web analytics to track the performance of your content. Optimize your content and SEO strategies over time.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T16:20:28Z