No matter what you’ve been told before, more SEO content is not always best. It’s more about the value of the content, than the quantity.

When it comes to driving traffic, engagement and conversions, deciding what content you need to keep, modify or throw away is an important decision. Content is what makes any website, but you’ve got to make sure it’s relevant to your brand.

Outdated, irrelevant and underperforming content can have a detrimental effect on the success of your website. And, today I’ll be discussing how you can clean up your content without affecting your SEO rankings.

Let’s get into it.

Run A Site Content Audit

The first step in cleaning up your website’s content is to run a content audit. 

This beneficial analysis assesses the performance, relevance, and quality of your site’s content.

Various metrics including traffic, bounce rate and engagement can be used to identify which pages are performing well, and that is not. After you’ve separated the two, you can prioritize those that are not based on how valuable they are to your website. 

The pages that are not driving traffic or conversion may need to take priority over the pages that are not performing well altogether but still align with your site’s overall goals. 

Separate Evergreen & Time-Sensitive Content

Secondly, you want to identify if a page and its content are evergreen or time-sensitive. 

Evergreen content is like gold dust, as it can be updated and repurposed over time, whilst you may need to delete time-sensitive content. 

After reviewing each segment of content, you can decide what on-page action is needed. 

When it comes to the pages that are still relevant but are underperforming, you may be able to turn this around by updating them with fresh, informative content to improve their performance in the SERPs. 

Whilst those pages that display time-sensitive content may just need to be removed altogether. 

If you remove content, make sure 301 redirects to relevant pages are implemented to prevent any backlinks from being pointed to the old pages. Not only will this affect your SEO score, but it will also lead to a bad user experience. 

Monitor Your Rankings

After you’ve cleaned up your content, make sure to monitor your SEO rankings, to ensure the changes don’t negatively affect them. 

But don’t stop there.

The task of content optimization can affect your traffic, conversions, website navigation, and other elements that could impact your overall SEO efforts. 

Keep a close eye on your Google Analytics. If you see any traffic decline, you may need to go back in re-evaluate the changes you made. But don’t jump to conclusions straight away. 

Before you blame your optimisation efforts, make sure that the changes you made onsite are actually what has caused the drop – and ensure these changes are steady in the search engines index. 

Great things take time, and this goes for SEO. It can take time for your rankings to become stable after content changes, so be patient with it and continue to monitor your website performance over a long period. 

If you want to further optimise your content, take a look at Google Search Console to help identify pages with high user impressions but low click-through rates.

The pages identified may see a greater performance if the content is updated or optimised. 

Overall

Having a clean-up of your website content and page is paramount to maintaining a high-quality search ranking.

Carrying out a content audit, prioritising important content, and deciding what content is needed, needs updating or removing can make for a better user experience whilst preventing any negative impact on the rankings. 

Be patient as your site adjusts to the changes and keep on top of monitoring your rankings. 

Thanks for reading,

Myk Baxter, eCommerce Consultant