Maisie Lloyd
Maisie is the Digital Content Manager at Intelligency, handling all things creative for the agency. Her experience centres around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
What is content pruning?
Content pruning is a process used to remove content that no longer serves a purpose. This could be because it’s become outdated, is no longer relevant to a business’s offering, or simply isn’t of a quality that reflects business standards.
When content is removed from a site, redirects may need to be put in place to send users and search engines to a relevant, existing piece of content. This could be:
- A newer version of the content
- A relevant alternative resource
- A category page providing a range of related resources
- A relevant service or product page
If there’s no suitable replacement, the page may be removed without a redirect.
How to decide what content needs to be pruned?
Pruning isn’t just done on a whim; it’s a tactical decision made through content analysis. Often the result of a content audit, which collects data on content performance to give insight into what works and what doesn’t and can often help rationalise decisions to delete content.
Considering factors as mentioned above, it essentially boils down to relevance and quality; a simple read-through often indicates whether something needs to be removed or revived. A content audit, which looks at metrics like click-through rate, views, average engagement times, and revenue earned, can reveal what isn’t performing by metrics.
In this process, there’s usually a benchmark for good, needs work, and bad. It’s content that either needs work but isn’t worth the time and resources, or that is bad and will be best suited for pruning. If content has consistently lost traffic and fallen in ranking, then it likely demonstrates the need to delete or at least review it for elimination.
An equal opportunity for removal is when the content is not attracting the right audience, often not relevant to your business’s offering.
An added benefit of removing content is removing index bloat. That essentially takes up space as Google’s indexing crawlers scan content that is no longer relevant, instead of content which would potentially build authority, send trust signals and help with rankings.
How often should content be pruned?
There’s no set frequency for how often you should prune content. As long as content remains useful, relevant and informative to your audience, there’s no basis for removal. Once content no longer has a lasting purpose, that’s an indicator that you may need to remove it.
A good frequency to check content relevance and performance is roughly every six months. Tracking it every time you check it helps you spot an overall trend in its performance; those with declining metrics indicate a need for renewal or elimination.
A good pattern to establish is to do monthly monitoring, checking for significant traffic fluctuations or ranking drops. Every six months, you can then review the wider content library, allowing you to identify pages that need merging, updating or removing. Annually, reassess whether content still aligns with business services, the audience and your wider marketing strategy.
Keep your content relevant
Content pruning is an important part of maintaining a healthy website, ensuring your content continues to serve a purpose for both your business and your audience. By regularly reviewing performance, relevance and quality, you can identify opportunities to update, consolidate or remove content that no longer adds value.
Ultimately, content pruning isn’t about reducing the number of pages on your website, but making sure the content you have is working as effectively as possible.
