Boost Your SEO with Effective Content Pruning

How to Streamline Your Website and Enhance Search Engine Performance

As a website owner, you must be trying to increase your online visibility. Your goal is always to stay on top of new Google algorithm updates, which is often an endless grind. If you've noticed a dip in your website traffic, it might be time to examine your content more closely. Google's 2023 Helpful Content Update shifted the focus from just high-quality content to the overall quality of your entire site.

The search engine giant consistently rolls out changes, both big and small. These changes aim to increase search results relevancy and quality to improve the experience for searchers. These same changes may lead to seemingly unexplained fluctuations in your website's keyword rankings.?

Understanding the 2023 Helpful Content Update

But what does Google's 2023 Helpful Content Update mean? Well, any low-traffic pages, those with outdated information or weaker content, factor into the quality of your ranking. If your site or blog has such pages, they could drag the overall rankings down.

The Helpful Content Update accentuates the need for valuable, relevant, and up-to-date content across your site. Google's algorithm doesn't just reward the good stuff—it also penalizes sites with poor-performing pages. If your website has underperforming pages or outdated information, it is time to remove them. Otherwise, they could negatively impact your entire site's search engine rankings. That's why content pruning matters.

What's Content Pruning and It Matters

In farming, pruning involves selectively removing specific plant parts, such as buds, branches, or roots. We apply this practice primarily to trees and shrubs. It prevents these unwanted parts from misusing the plant's resources, ensuring the plants remain healthy and attractive.

But that's in farming! We use virtually the same concept in optimizing your website for search engines. So, content pruning involves removing or updating low-quality or outdated content on your website. And you do so to maintain or improve the overall quality of your site.

The results for content pruning are almost instant. It quickly boosts your SEO performance, sometimes even quicker and more effective than improving your Core Web Vitals. You only need relevant, high-quality content that enhances your site's credibility. And this rewards your site with high performance in search results.

How to Prune Your Content

In farming, timing and knowing how and where to cut are essential for optimal pruning results. You should trim at the right angles and the proper distances and lengths. Well, the same applies to content pruning. Here's how to do it:

1.?Identify Low-Performing Pages

Use tools like Ubersuggest to pinpoint which pages on your site are not performing well. These pages have low traffic, high bounce rates, or outdated information.

2. Evaluate Content Quality?

Assess whether these pages provide value to your audience. Google offers a self-assessment to help you evaluate your content. The assessment questions analyze your site's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT).

It's helpful to assess your content while creating it, and once you've completed it, keep the assessment in your back pocket for the future.

From now on, you may want to revisit the assessment if the pages' keyword rankings decrease after a helpful content update.

3. Update or Remove

You don't want to keep outdated or irrelevant pages. Could you consider updating them? However, only update the content on pages with the potential to make them relevant and valuable.

But if they don't align with your current content strategy or audience needs, remove them. They no longer serve any purpose. Doing so helps streamline your site and improve user experience.

4.?Monitor and Adjust

Pruning is not a one-off thing! After pruning your content, monitor your site's performance. Use analytics to track changes in traffic and rankings and adjust your strategy as needed.

Supplementing Your SEO Strategy

While pruning content is essential, diversifying your SEO strategy is also beneficial. Consider supplementing organic efforts with paid ads to maintain visibility and traffic. Use tools like my free Ads Grader to optimize your ad campaigns and ensure the best return on investment.

By focusing on high-quality content and regularly pruning your site, you can stay ahead of Google's updates and maintain a solid online presence. Start today and see the difference it makes!

Next time we discuss EEAT, we will answer the simple yet confusing question: Are search ranking factors? You'll learn why some SEOs dismiss EE-A-T while others embrace it fully and why searchers also have different opinions.

Need Help?

If the SEO content process seems overwhelming, don't worry. I'm here to help you. I'll prune your content and employ other SEO strategies to boost your site's performance. Please feel free to reach out for personalized assistance and watch your rankings recover.