SEO Content pruning is a process whereby the content of a website is edited and improved to ensure it fulfils user needs. It’s an essential, ongoing process that can be applied at any point during a site’s life cycle. In this article, we will explore 13 SEO Content Pruning strategies you should consider using on your site.
1. The Content Audit
The first step in any pruning process is to conduct a content audit. A content audit involves reviewing each page on your site and determining whether it is useful, relevant, and optimized for the search engines.
A thorough content audit will ensure you don’t have useless pages cluttering up your site, making it more difficult for users to find the content they’re looking for. It will also help you focus on those pages that are particularly important to visitors, helping you identify those with the highest potential return on investment (ROI).
2. Review Your Site’s Navigation
Once you’ve identified your site’s content, the next step is to review its navigation structure. Is your navigation menu easy to use? Does it contain links to all the key pages on your site? Does it have an “About Us” section that provides useful information about your business and/or service offerings?
If not, you should add these pages or update the existing content on your site to ensure users can easily find what they’re looking for.
3. Determine which pages and sections need pruning
Once you’ve identified the parts of your site that aren’t working as they should, you’ll want to determine whether they need to be pruned or simply updated. Is the information on the page outdated? Do users not find the page useful? If this is the case, then you should consider pruning it. If not, then update it to ensure it’s a more effective part of your site.
4. Consider how important each page is
Another consideration you’ll want to make is how important each of your pages is. This is a key part of the pruning process as it will help you determine which content to focus on in terms of pruning and updating. Some pages are very important, so it makes sense to ensure they’re fully optimized with the best possible information/links so that they are a stronger part of your site – especially if they’re user-generated content (UGC).
5. Review Your Site’s Overall Page Load Speed
Your final step in the process of content pruning is to check whether your current site suffers from page load speed issues. If it does, you should make sure you’re loading your site as fast as possible and that it loads quickly and the pages load in an order that’s perceived to be “natural.”
This is another important aspect of SEO that needs to be taken into consideration during a content pruning process. It’s something that also needs to be reviewed on a regular basis as you update your site.
6. Don’t spend too much time pruning
Because there is so much involved in conducting an SEO Content Pruning process, it’s important to ensure you don’t spend too much time doing it. It can be easy to get caught up in the moment and try to fix each and every page on your site, but this is a sure-fire way of getting yourself into trouble.
Instead, limit your content pruning process to a few key pages that you’ve identified need improvement. This will help improve your site’s performance while reducing development time.
7. Prune – Don’t delete!
Although it can be tempting to just start deleting content from your site, this isn’t something you should do until you’ve conducted a thorough review of the page and determined it is no longer useful.
Instead, prune your content by removing the links and text from the page that are not necessary. For example, if two pages on your site contain a list of links to other relevant pages that will contain extra information about a specific topic or topic area, you can save space on both pages by providing the links only once.
8. Your site will become more sustainable
Another benefit of SEO Content Pruning is the ease it gives you in terms of site maintenance and site improvements. This is because it forces you to focus on organizing the content on each page of your site for users to find as quickly as possible, which will help ensure search engine spiders can crawl your pages more easily, resulting in improved SEO.
9. Incorporate related links
One of the best ways to improve a page’s overall SEO is to ensure you incorporate relevant links from other pages on your site. This way, when users click through from one document to another, they are taken directly to the page they’re looking for. It also takes them through a series of the most relevant pages on your site.
To do this effectively, you should include as many links as possible throughout any given page and ensure each link clearly indicates the name of the relevant document. This will help users find what they’re looking for more easily and quickly.
10. Title tags are the most important aspect of each page
Title tags are vital to overall SEO and should be considered most important when you’re pruning your pages. Use this opportunity to ensure you’ve got the right title tags in place for each page. Doing so will help search engines better understand what each page is about, which will lead to improved rankings.
11. Make your site easier for search engines to crawl
Because pruning your site will make it easier for search engines to crawl the content on your pages, you should focus on making sure each page is as accessible and crawlable as possible.
In addition, pruning helps ensure you’re not spending time on tasks that don’t enhance your page’s SEO, which means you can focus on things like improving user experience by optimizing each page for mobile usage.
All of these things will lead to better SEO performance, which is the ultimate goal of your pruning process.
12. Wait until you’ve updated the page before conducting a review
While it’s possible to conduct an SEO Content Pruning process on your site at any time, you’ll get better results if you wait until the page has been updated. It’s important to do so because any content that is added will actually add backlinks to the page.
13. Get your team involved
While it’s important to maintain a focus on SEO, don’t spend too much time worrying about the optimization process itself. Instead, get your team involved in the SEO Content Pruning process and let them do most of the work for you. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to SEO and will make your site more efficient and profitable overall.
What are the benefits of content pruning for SEO?
One of the most important things you want to do when it comes to SEO is to ensure you’re improving your ranking with each page you publish. This is one of the main purposes of the dynamic website content, which is why content pruning can be so beneficial for your SEO.
When you prune content, you’re reducing the amount of content on each page, which helps ensure search engines are able to index all of it properly.
In addition, pruning content can help improve your SEO visibility as well. Not only are you improving your chances of being ranked at the top of search results, but you’re also helping to create a more useful user experience.
By removing any unnecessary content from each page, you’re not only reducing the overall size of each page, but by doing so, you’re also cutting down on page bounce rates as well. This means those pages that have unnecessary content aren’t being seen as often by users.
Because of this, you’ll also begin gaining more organic traffic from search engines as well.
Not only does dynamic content help your SEO, but it also helps with user experience. When you prune content, it’s easier for users to navigate your website and find relevant information. The more content you remove from each page, the smaller it becomes and the easier it becomes to find what they’re looking for.
If you are new to SEO and are content writer, we have an in depth SEO Content Writing Guide, here.
