Ahh yes, the ancient art of content pruning is seeing a renaissance in the wake of Google’s Helpful Content update.

Except pruning content isn’t that old of an SEO technique and is one that has been feared (rightly so) by many SEOs. As the power of a successful prune can breathe life back into a website, an ugly hack job can seriously harm your website’s performance.

So, be mindful of who you’re handing those pruning shears to.

In this blog post, we’ll look at what content pruning is exactly, how it impacts your SEO and the best way to go about conducting a successful content pruning strategy.

What is Content Pruning?

Content pruning is the practice of identifying underperforming or non-helpful web pages and removing them from your website to improve your site’s overall SEO health.

This can be done through a number of methods, such as deleting outdated blog posts, removing low-quality pages, merging similar content, or redirecting URLs to more relevant content.

The full pruning process involves auditing and analysis to determine your content’s fate—whether it be reviving, repurposing, or ultimately the removal of low-quality content.

The goal of content pruning is to improve your website’s overall health by removing the dead weight—thus improving user experience and focusing your site’s energy on authoritative content that is helpful for people (and Google).

Why Prune Content?

Content pruning is one of the most underutilized SEO techniques that can deliver results for your website.

By removing poor performing pages, you can improve the ratio of high-quality indexed pages that exist on your site. The higher the ratio of quality pages compared to the total number of pages on your site can lead to an enhanced performance in the SERPs, as the overall ‘value’ of your site has improved.

Benefits of Content Pruning

With Google’s latest helpful content  and core algorithm update launching within the last month or so, now is a perfect time to clear out some lackluster content from your site. This is especially true if it has been a while or you have never audited your content in this fashion.

With a further emphasis on creating better experiences and more helpful content, its become more of a necessity to reevaluate the pages on your website and see if it is helping or hurting your overall site health.

Some of the major benefits of content pruning include:

Higher Quality Content

Elevate your overall quality of content.

When you remove outdated or poor-quality content from your website, you improve your site’s overall quality. This impact is two-fold: (1) you’re able to remove old content that is often unhelpful or outdated for visitors and (2) search engines, like Google, consider the overall quality (and authority) of a website when determining its rank within the search results.

Improve UX

Helping people find the right stuff.

If there’s a lot of low-quality or outdated content on your site, it can be hard for people to find the accurate information they’re looking for.

No one likes to read an article, only to find out the post is from 7 years ago and no longer reflects the modern advice they should be receiving.

This poor user experience can speak to your credibility as a business and website—leaving people feeling frustrated and like you wasted their time. Rough.

Maximize Crawl Budget

Getting the most from Googlebot.

Search engines may not index all the pages on your site if they think they’re low quality. When you prune pages from your site, you’re maximizing your crawl budget by helping Googlebot more easily find your best content—helping you get the most out of each crawl.

Helpful Content Era

For the people…and Google.

As the helpful content update continues to expand its scope, diligence with high-quality content will remain a priority. Continuing to monitor your site’s performance while removing or updating underperforming content periodically can help your site stay current with this next wave of algorithm advances.

Optimized Linking

Pointing to the right places.

A strong link strategy, for both internal and external links, can help your website on a number of levels.

Not only are you directing users to the most helpful content on (or off) your site, but you are also ensuring that you’re passing link authority to the right places on your site—helping elevate your over performance.

How to Prune Your Content

Let’s get into it! How to approach a strategic content pruning session. There are five-main-steps when thinking about a content pruning process for your website:

1. Collect Your Content: Get a list of pages on your site.
2. Gather Your Data: Grab performance data from available sources.
3. Conduct a Content Audit: Evaluate how your content is performing.
4. Finalize Your URL’s Fate: You’ve got options.
5. Backup, Rollout & Monitor: Execute your plan and track its impact.

Step 1: Collect Your Content

Creating a list of all the pages on your website.

For this step, you can export a list of URLs from your CMS. If you’re unable to export from your CMS, you can grab a list of URLs from Google Analytics or Search Console.

The Analytics option won’t necessarily yield a complete list of URLs, as someone needs to visit a page for Google Analytics to record a visit. However, this can still be a great starting point, you may just be missing some pages that don’t see any traffic.

After you have collected a list of URLs, make sure to remove any duplicates, as this will serve as your master list in the content audit portion of this process.

Step 2: Gather Your Data

Grab page specific performance data from available sources.

You want to look at all the available data you have to help gain as many insights as you can on the URLs in question. The source data you accumulate here will help keep you from making any costly errors, such as mistakenly eliminating the wrong pages.

You can pull in a host of data from various sources including (but not limited to):

Google Analytics:

• All traffic — a breakdown of visits, unique pageviews, bounce rate, exit rate, conversions, page value on a page-by-page basis. In Google Analytics, Behavior > Site Content > All Pages> Export.
• Organic traffic — You can filter the All Traffic report to show only organic traffic by applying an Organic Traffic segment.

You’ll want to pull in data from the last 12 months along with data going back a few years. This can be helpful when determining the fate of your content—by understanding if the page has ever performed well, and not just how it has done in the past year.

Google Search Console:

• External Links — These are links pointing to your domain from another website. You want to consider the number and quality of links pointing to your site. It’s very important to not get rid of any URLs that are receiving quality links from other sources. In Search Console, navigate to Links > External Links > More > Export.
• Internal Links — These are links within your website that are linking to other pages on your own website. In Search Console, Links > Internal Links > More > Export.
• Search Results — This report allows you to export impressions, clicks, click-through-rate (CTR) and average position in the Google search results for each of your URLs. Within Search Console > Search Results > Pages > Export.

Bing Webmaster Tools:

• Backlinks — An alternative method of downloading your site’s backlinks provided by Microsoft. This data can help you understand how many other domains are pointing to your website.
  • In Webmaster tools, Backlinks > Backlinks for Your Site > Pages > Download All.
  • To get a numerical value of links pointing to each URL, you can quickly run the Excel function =UNIQUE(C:C) this will get you a list of all unique URLs listed in the target URL column.
  • Then you can run another Excel function =COUNTIF(C:C, x2). The ‘x’ represents the column where you have your list of unique URLs. So, if you put your list of unique URLs in column ‘D’, the function would be =COUNTIF (C:C, D2). This will get you the number of backlinks pointing to each unique URL.
• Search Performance — This report provides insights into the number of impressions, clicks and average position in the Bing search results each page on your site has achieved.
  In Webmaster Tools > Search Performance > By Page > Download All.

Content Management System:

In WordPress, there are several plugins that can help you export this data.

• Publish date — This displays when the post was originally published.
• Last updated — This shows you when the post was last updated.
• Word Count — An export of words per page can help identify thin content. You can also grab this info from site crawling software like Screaming Frog.

Google Search Operators:

• Indexed content — Using the search operator site:example.com. You can gather a list of URLs that google has indexed for your site.
• Dated references & content — using this advanced search operator, site:example.com intext:”2016″ | intext:”2015″ | intext:”2014″ | intext:”2013”. You can search for content on your website that has any of those years listed in the body of the page copy.

Quick note: there are several Chrome extensions that can help you quickly extract a list of the URLs listed on the SERPs when you conduct these searches.

Paid Tools:

There are many tools out there that can provide additional insights into your website’s performance on a page-by-page basis. If you have access to any of these advanced tools, please include this data to help you evaluate the performance of each page on your site.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

Use data and evaluate how your content is performing.

It’s time to compile all that data into a content auditing document. You can use your data tool of choice such as Excel, Google Sheets, R, Power BI, etc.

We’re looking to match each URL up with the corresponding data points from each of our exports.

From there it’s a matter of weighing and evaluating each of these metrics on a page-by-page basis, compared to the overall performance of your website as a whole.

Your content auditing document should help you identify opportunities on what to do with each page of your site.

Using the exported data, the Excel document above correlates each of the data points to the corresponding URL and compares it to the overall performance of the website.

The spreadsheet should help identify any pages that are:

• Not getting any traffic
• Receiving minimal organic traffic
• Not leading to conversions
• Not assisting on the path to conversion (page value)
• Not getting many backlinks
• Featuring (potentially) outdated information
• URLs with a low word count (thin content)

The final column gives a suggested outcome for each page. Please keep in mind each URL should also be subject to a manual review (Step 4). Data can help us, but it can’t paint the full picture here.

Step 4: Finalize Your URL’s Fate

What are you going to do with all that content? You’ve got options.

Ok, so you have your content audit document and you’re now ready to determine the fate of your URLs. If you added a suggested outcome column, you’ll have an idea of where the data is leading and you can begin sorting your content into three groups:

1. Keep it: do (basically) nothing. That was easy 😅
2. Update it: Improve, update, combine or repurpose
3. Remove it: 301, noindex or canonical

Now, each URL is still subject to manual review—just because your content audit suggests an outcome, does not mean it’s final. So here are a few more columns I add to my spreadsheet during a manual review before making any final decisions:

• Target keyword: The focus keyword/ phrase for the page. (Some paid tools can help automate this for you!)
• Ease of updating: Rate how easy the content would be to update (Scale 1-10).
• Notes: Any additional notes or thoughts.
• Final outcome: Note the final decision for each URL.

Whether you address these last few items or decide to skip them, you’ll at least want to make sure you add the ‘Final outcome’ column to your spreadsheet to mark the action you plan to take with each of these URLs after your manual review.

The “Keep It” Group

Do (basically) nothing.

This is the easy group. These are pages that are doing well—they drive traffic, have backlinks, convert users and generally rank well organically.

Additionally, this group will include any pages that should not be removed, like your privacy policy, contact page, terms and conditions and recently published pages that have not had time to properly evaluate.

You’re going to want to note the target keywords for each of these pages and look for any cannibalization that may occur from pages that don’t perform as well. We’ll identify those URLs in the next group and deal with them accordingly.

Some SEO topics are speculative, and keyword cannibalization is one of them. Different opinions exist: some people say it is a serious issue, whereas others are not even sure about its existence.

So, what is keyword cannibalization? Does it really impact a website’s ranking? Let’s take a closer look at the phenomenon and find out when it is an issue and when it is not. In case it is, we should know how to detect and fix it.

What is keyword cannibalization in SEO

Keyword cannibalization is a ranking issue when several pages from the same website compete in search results for one keyword, hurting each other’s ranks. Keyword cannibalization occurs when different pages appear to be optimized for the same query, and Google cannot identify which of them is more relevant. As a result, these pages compete with one another in organic results, and none of them can get to the top positions.

The SEO term was coined from the marketing concept of product cannibalization: this is when a company loses in sales because it has introduced a new product, replacing an older one.

The pretext for inventing this term appeared in the early era of search optimization. In those times, people believed that it would be easier for their websites to rank if they created many pages targeting the same keyword.

Further on, Google introduces several updates, one of them called the Site Diversity Update, seeking to limit the presence of a single domain in one SERP. This improvement aimed to diversify search results and increase organic competition.

At present, host crowding and domain clustering filters prevent multiple same-domain pages from appearing in the organic listings. In the past, you could find five pages from the same domain in the top 10. Today, Google shows two pages from the same domain on a SERP, in rare cases a little more.

Today, search engines can define quite precisely what a page is about. Moreover, search engines go far beyond keyword density, guessing the search intent and pages’ relevance to a query. If Google finds several relevant articles on the same website, it will show them in the SERP. But would those pages cannibalize each other? Well, it depends.

What is NOT keyword cannibalization

An average page occupying the first position on a SERP for a popular keyword can also rank for about a hundred other keywords. No wonder the landing page may intersect with other same-domain pages targeting similar or the same keywords.

How to detect keyword cannibalization on a website

Now, let’s look at the cases of keyword cannibalization that turn out to be a problem that ruins SEO efforts. In such cases, your ranks may suffer as well as CTR, conversions, and other crucial site metrics. The most dangerous thing about keyword cannibalization is that it is hard to notice it immediately.

The simplest way is to run the site: search for your keyword. Google will show all your site’s pages drawn into the SERP by this query. Take notice of the URLs with similar titles and content.

Once again, you can search for your keyword and remove the domain clustering filter, setting the value to &filter=0 with the search. It will reveal more pages in the SERP triggered by the query. This can be a clue to where to make changes for each page to start showing up on its own.

If you need supportive evidence to prove keyword cannibalization is in action, you can check your ranks and spot cases when multiple pages are ranking for the same queries. Next, you should find out whether the pages hurt each one’s ranking.

Briefly, you will be looking for multiple pages ranking quite low for the same query in the SERPs and changing their positions frequently.

This task may look somewhat complicated unless you have a ranking tool for it.

How to fix keyword cannibalization

There are several ways to fix SEO content cannibalization. You might need to use any of those that suit your case or combine different methods.

Consolidate pages

This method fits when you have several pages on the same topic. Analyze their content to select interesting details on each page. Then rewrite the landing, taking the most useful content and merging these pages into a better in-depth piece.

You may delete the unneeded pages. However, if they have some ranking power, it’s better to set up proper redirects to the new landing page.

To make your landing page more relevant to the target keyword, use SEO writing tools to increase their chances for optimization success. Content Editor in WebSite Auditor is a nice solution to help you do this. Just paste your existing URL or add a new one and paste the target keyword. Content Editor will give you all the helpful data based on the competitive analysis of the top 10 ranking results.

Add internal links to increase a page’s prominence

Internal linking is crucial for getting SEO done right. It shapes a website structure and helps search engines better understand the importance of site pages. The more backlinks a page has, the more prominent it seems.

Fix duplication issues

Duplication issues are not strictly about keyword cannibalization as such, but it works similarly: search engines cannot figure out which page to show out of several identical. Of course, Google may try to identify which page is the main one. But it will also take a bit longer for Google to discover and sort out all these duplicated pages.

Make certain that your site is clean from duplicate issues by.

In certain cases, often happening on e-commerce or multi-locale websites, duplicate content can be fixed by canonicalization. The rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines which page from several duplicates to show in the SERP. Moreover, the canonical tag consolidates link signals for similar pages into a single URL.

Thus, make sure to use the right canonicals to show search engines which pages you want to appear in the search results. Here Google provides detailed instructions on how to define canonicals.

Why keyword cannibalization is bad for SEO

Let’s take a closer look at the negative aspects of keyword cannibalization. So, why is keyword cannibalization so bad for SEO? Some of the reasons are that it leads to:

• Loss of traffic and conversions. As your landing page competes with another one in a SERP, it will undoubtedly receive less traffic and, consequently, fewer conversions.
• Loss of content value and website authority. Seeing too many pages from a website on the same topic, especially when they appear thin and insufficient, users lose trust in the expertise and authority of the site creators. And so does Google.
• The dilution of link value. Several pages optimized for the same keyword — intentionally or not — will receive less ranking power from links. This way, the link juice gets split between multiple URLs instead of being consolidated into one.

This negative impact will eventually make your SEO efforts just a waste of time and resources. So, the best approach here is to audit your pages for cannibalization issues, fix them, and try to prevent them in the future.

How to prevent keyword cannibalization

Whether you are just starting to build a website or thinking about creating a new page, you need to foresee cannibalization occurrences at the very beginning.

1. Research keywords with a focus on intent.

So when you search for target keywords for a new landing page, think about what intent a chosen keyword bears. In the process of creating new content, make sure to cover this intent. This will increase the probability that the landing page will be found relevant for this keyword.

2. Analyze SERPs for intent and ranking factors.

SERP analysis is closely connected with the previous point. Before creating a piece of content for a landing page, analyze the SERP for the target keywords. This step will save you lots of time and effort in the future.

Examine what types of content are shown at large for a given keyword. What intent does it cover? No wonder it would be hard to rank well for an informational search query if your content covers transactional intent, etc.

3. Track keyword positions.

Keyword mapping is an often underrated but great solution. Together with a content strategy, it may help you prevent keyword cannibalization and understand what content you will need to create in the future.

You may use a keyword mapping spreadsheet with your existing pages and assigned keywords, combining them with a content plan.  Or, to make it simpler, use the keyword mapping tool.

4. Audit your site regularly.

Site issues are generally a heavy drawback for SEO. Many Tools lets you run regular site audits: just set up an automated task to run a check-up on autopilot, and the tool will scan your site and even deliver the report to your inbox. As for keyword cannibalization, pay attention to duplicate issues, site structure, internal links, and anchor texts.

Conclusion

To sum up all of the above, here are the essentials of keyword cannibalization:

1. Multiple pages ranking low for the same query, and whose rankings fluctuate heavily, is a sign of keyword cannibalization.
2. Keyword cannibalization is hard to detect, but with position tracking, it can be done faster.
3. To prevent keyword cannibalization, focus on intent-based keyword optimization and audit your site’s SEO health regularly.

Even with high-quality content, all efforts may go awry with keyword cannibalization issues. This is not something on the surface, and losses may come unnoticed for quite a while. So, stick to thoughtful keyword planning, check SERPs, and audit your content regularly, and keyword cannibalization will never happen.

Are you thinking about creating a website for boosting your business?

If so, our 10 noteworthy steps can guide you on how to build a website for enhancing your business. Most of our unsuccessful projects became ineffective because the clients weren’t prepared to have us build their sites for them. And, why were their sites not effective? Simple. The reason, which appeared in front of us most of the time, is that the webmasters didn’t map out the goals and content of their websites in accordance with the business mission and vision standpoints of their respective companies. So, you need to have a site that’s made strategically, not the other way round. Got our point!

Below are the 10 essential guidelines for generating a website:

• Step No. 1: Define your targets.
• Step No. 2: Select your targeted audience.
• Step No. 3: Do competitor research.
• Step No. 4: Produce some content.
• Step No. 5: Decide what you like and what you don’t like.
• Step No. 6: Choose your style.
• Step No. 7: Pick a platform.
• Step No. 8: Find a company that could make your website.
• Step No. 9: Acquire the domain and web hosting services.
• Step No. 10: Build your site strategically.

Define your targets:

Well, the first step for you is to outline the goals of your website. Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have to figure out what’s the purpose(s) of your site for your audience. What do you want them to do on your platform? What is the CTA (call to action) of your content for your readers? Do you want your audience members to buy products, purchase services, or subscribe to your newsletter? Or, do you want to educate your readers through your content and gain some profit from the views and clicks of those ads that your audience finds interesting and engaging on your site? These are the sort of questions that help you define your goals or targets for your website.

Select your targeted audience:

Hmm, the more you know about your audience, the better. So, make a list of their traits to determine their persona. For example, what is their gender? Are they men, women, or both that need the content of your site? What is their geography, or where do they come from? What do they like, and what do they dislike? As an instance, they might all like sweets; chocolates; and ice creams if they’re children, and their age is below the teenage. Or, they might like babies’ items such as toys; nappies; and snacks, etc., if they’re mothers. Plus, it might be your audience dislikes dogs and likes cats or dislikes cats and likes dogs. The more you gather knowledge about your audience, the more targeted your business approach would be; therefore, your content would be up to the mark for your site visitors, and you could achieve your business targets with regularity and momentum.

Do competitor research:

In today’s time, people easily compare you against your competitors on search engines whether you’re a doctor, engineer, banker, writer, editor, or photographer, etc. So, what should you do regarding this matter? You should make a list of those essential points that help you stand out compared to your top 10 competitors on the internet. As an example, you have to determine the price, experience, and location of your competitors. Why? Coz most probably your clients would compare you with your competitors regarding these factors. That’s why what you require to do is compare yourself with your competitors regarding various parameters as mentioned above and figure out how you could be felt better as a company in front of your prospective clients online.

Produce some content:

Now, the next step for you is to produce some SEO (search engine optimized) content for your site. This step is the hardest step of the whole process. You have to create content pages that are unique, logical, relevant, engaging, and error-free; besides, these should include a CTA or call to action for your readers. Hmm, what will this content do for you? The standard site content would help you rank high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing; then, your targeted audience would land on your pages through SERPs (search engine results pages), and you could get your business goals through your site reliably.

Decide what you like and what you don’t like:

Invest some time to choose the top 6 sites that you like and the top 6 that you don’t like. Next, note down those key points that made you select websites in the list of favourite sites and also those points that made you select other websites in the list of unwanted sites. These websites could be of any industry or niche, not only of your competitors. Just check how the menus, content, pictures, infographics, and graphs, etc. are organized on your favourite sites so that you could have an idea how you should place items on your platform.

Choose your style:

You should also define the style of your website. The look and feel of your site should reflect your business vision and mission. Yes, your site design should indicate the culture of your company and the persona of your audience. Now, let’s move on to know the details of the seventh step.

Pick a platform:

What type of platform you need for your site depends on your business goals. For example, if you’re creating a blog, WordPress would be a great option, and if you’re creating an e-commerce store, you might want to choose Joomla and Virtuemart. So, take some time and do your research online to see which hosting services provider would be the best for you.

Find a company that could make your website:

Plus, you need to search for a company that could make a website for you. There are many reasons that you need professional help in this matter. And yes, you can’t do it yourself coz you might not be a professional web developer. Besides, if you’re the one, you can’t focus on each and every aspect of your site business on your own reliably. The simple reason is it’s not humanly possible.

So, you need the professional web development services of a company like ours that could perform all difficult site development tasks for you from the start until the end. And, don’t worry about the pricing of these services; these are more affordable than you expect. Just do some research online to find the company which could provide you with a quote on your project request. Then, see whether the quote matches your desired work quality and required deadline. We could also assist you in this matter. Just let us know what you want, and we’ll answer your queries as soon as possible.

Acquire the domain and web hosting services:

Hmm, you should buy the domain and hosting services after deciding which company would build your website. You might get a reliable domain from many credible companies such as Namecheap, GoDaddy, and Blue Host, etc. Then, you could also get hosting services from a lot of popular firms such as Hostinger, Host Gator, and SiteGround, etc. Your domain and host depend on your hosting needs and project budget, so do choose any company while keeping in mind the above two factors.

Build your site strategically:

Well, when you’ve decided what your goals are and all other things, it’s time to create a website. If you decide to hire a company for this action, you need to consider the following points:

• Make a list of those deliverables that you want from the company such as picture galleries, contact forms, and relevant videos, etc.
• You have to sign a contract with the organization that outlines your deliverable items clearly.
• Be the owner of every site-related thing and specifically source files.
• Back up your site data again and again on your latest storage hardware.
• You should talk to the executives of several companies that provide web development services and get their ideas regarding aspects like project pricing and deadline estimates to help yourself choose the best company.

Hopefully, you might have learned the necessary steps for creating a website, but we want to let you know something extremely noteworthy here. Never underestimate the importance of standard content for your site and hire a content writer to attain result-oriented content. Otherwise, you would lose your precious time and adequate money; therefore, attain quality content written by a professional writer for your online platform. Hmm, so that’s all from our side today.