Over 75% of marketers confirm that their content marketing is effective for generating leads and revenue. However, stale content can adversely impact your search engine optimization and wreck those success rates, which is why you need to employ content-pruning SEO tactics.
Brand awareness, leads, and eventual sales only come about when your website’s visibility and traffic are high as a result of quality content. Pruning that content keeps it in tip-top shape for maximum results.
Get a better look at how to execute strategies for content pruning benefits.
Defining Content Pruning SEO
Content pruning involves removing or revising content that is not drawing traffic to a website. Such stale or thin content holds your site back from reaching its full potential.
Just like caring for the plants in a garden, content pruning is not a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process that should be a constant aspect of your SEO content strategy.
What Is Stale Content?
Stale content refers to obsolete information that does not drive traffic to your site. Like the loaf of bread you bought several days ago, put in the cabinet, and forgot all about, older content on your website can become “stale.”
Sometimes, it only makes sense to throw out stale food and content. On the other hand, just as you can repurpose stale bread to make delicious French toast or homemade croutons, content pruning for SEO can give stale content a second chance to draw in traffic.
What Is the Ideal Length of Content for SEO?
Recent studies suggest that the optimal length for an SEO page is between 1,000 and 2,500 words. Longer posts allow you to cover a subject more thoroughly and provide genuine value to your audience. In addition to fully relaying multiple points on the topic, longer posts offer more opportunities to create backlinks.
However, the specific length depends on what the audience segment that you’re targeting wants. In any case, you have to avoid thin content. This refers to inferior pages that don’t delve deep enough into the subject to provide value.
What Are the Top Content Pruning Benefits?
Regularly using content pruning SEO strategies offers the following advantages:
- Provides a better experience for users, increasing their time on your site and engagement
- Prevents web crawlers from spending time on low-quality pages, which leads to low rankings
- Improves the distribution of link authority, which is the importance a page gains when other sites link back to it
- Prevents duplicate pages and content cannibalization, which can weaken page rankings
These content pruning benefits help you maximize the ROI from your digital marketing efforts.
Identifying SEO Content To Prune
As a digital marketing leader, SEO coordinator, or SEO strategist, you should conduct regular audits to evaluate how your site is performing. When creating the audit, view the crawled pages. To fast-track the process, it is a good rule of thumb to focus on one type of page at a time, such as landing pages.
Then, identify content that isn’t performing well. These will be the pages ripe for content pruning SEO work. Pinpoint low-performing content by isolating the metrics that translate into success for your marketing. Key performance indicators to focus on include:
- Keyword rankings
- Backlink quality and quantity
- Conversion rates
- Engagement rates
You can divide conversion and engagement into general, organic, and social performance for a more refined view of their results.
Next, organize your pages. Not every page needs the same type of pruning. Categorize the content into pages with stale content, thin content, duplicate content, or insufficient links.
