Today’s Do SEO question comes from Neethu, who asks:
My website is almost 20 years old. There is a lot of content. Many of them do not perform well. How to effectively clean this content without affecting rankings?
Contrary to what some SEO professionals will tell you, more content is not always better.
Deciding which content to keep, which content to modify, and which content to discard is an important consideration, as content is the backbone of any website and is essential for driving traffic, engagement and conversions.
However, not all content is created equal, and outdated, irrelevant, or underperforming content can hinder a website’s success.
Run a content audit
To effectively clean up your website content, the first step is to conduct a content audit.
This involves analyzing your site’s content and evaluating its performance, relevance and quality.
You can use various metrics such as traffic, bounce rate, and engagement to identify which pages are performing well and which are not.
Once you’ve identified the pages that aren’t performing well, it’s important to prioritize them based on their importance to your website.
Pages that aren’t generating traffic or conversions may need to be prioritized over pages that aren’t performing well, but are still important to your site’s overall goals.
Distinguish Evergreen vs. Time sensitive content
Also, it’s important to consider whether a page is perennial or time-sensitive.
You can update or reuse evergreen content over time, while you may need to remove time-sensitive content.
After prioritizing your content, you can decide what action to take with each page.
For pages that are still relevant but not performing well, you may be able to update them with new information to improve their performance.
For pages that are outdated or no longer relevant, it may be better to remove them altogether.
When removing content, implement 301 redirects to relevant pages to ensure backlinks pointing to the old page are not lost.
Monitor your stuff
It’s important to monitor your search engine ranking after you clean up your content to make sure your changes don’t negatively affect your SEO.
But don’t just look at the rankings.
Content optimization projects can affect traffic, conversions, navigation, and other elements that affect your overall search engine optimization efforts.
Take a close look at Google Analytics. If there are decreases in traffic, you may need to re-evaluate some changes.
However, it is important not to have a knee-jerk reaction.
Before you launch your optimization efforts, make sure the changes you’ve made are actually the ones causing the crash, and make sure those changes are stable in the search engine index.
Remember that it can take some time for your rankings to stabilize after a content cleanup, so it’s important to be patient and monitor your website’s performance over time.
To further optimize your content cleanup, consider using Google Search Console to identify pages with high impressions but low click-through rates.
These pages may benefit from content updates or optimizations to improve performance.
Additionally, consolidating pages that cover similar topics into one complete page can improve user experience and prevent keyword cannibalization.
To sum up
Cleanliness of your website content is crucial to maintaining a high quality site.
By conducting a content audit, prioritizing content, and deciding whether to keep, update, or remove content, you can effectively clean up your site without negatively impacting your rankings.
Remember to monitor your ranking and be patient while your site adjusts.
More resources:
Featured Image: Song_about_summer/Shutterstock
[ad_2]
Source link
