4 Steps to Consolidate Your Content for SEO
Why content consolidation is important for your SEO?
We understand that saying that “consolidate your content” is not enough to understand what this process can give you, so let’s be more precise. To consolidate content is to get rid of irrelevant, outdated, thin content and grouping pages, articles, blogs, i.e., pieces of content into the in-depth, most relevant, and ultimately useful resource on a specific subject.
And here are the reasons why consolidation is good for SEO:
- It allows meeting the quality and relevance standards of Google and other search engines.
- You can turn your similar competing pages that are ruining each other’s potential into a genuinely useful piece of content that would compete successfully with other sites, not with your own pages.
- Regular checks, updates, consolidate allow providing your site visitors with the best version of the article, blog, etc.
- You get fewer pages with much better content, and that is good from the perspective of SEO and is treated as the right policy by search engines.
- It is a good way to make old pages rank again just by updating them.
How To Consolidate Your Website?
Step 1. Identify and Delete Bad Content
You likely started making content before you really knew how to do proper keyword research or create amazing content. That’s okay; you can still do something about that old content, as long as you’re willing to look with a critical and unbiased eye.
Here are some types of content to watch for:
Thin Content
Thin content is basically all the content floating around on your website that has no value. You need to go through all your content and find any articles that just don’t add value to your website. Any content that will be seen as inferior by Google (and other search engines) has to go.
Duplicate Content
Chances are you have duplicated content, not because you created the same content repeatedly, but because other pages have the same kind of content. This isn’t a big problem, as long as your content isn’t word-for-word the same as someone else’s.
To avoid this issue, make sure you add your own touch of personality to every page of your marketing website, even the Terms and Condition section.
Poorly Performing Content
This is any content that isn’t performing well and doesn’t do your digital website any favors or bring in any traffic. You likely have many pages that just don’t do what they made to do. You can update and refresh these nearly-dead pages of content or simply delete them and focus on making new digital content.
Outdated Content
Outdated content can happen to anyone, and it’s likely it’s happened to you. Your website could have many outdated blogs, articles, and other marketing content that is no longer relevant or accurate.
Step 2. Group Remaining Content by Topic
Every good blog or website needs to be decently organized so visitors don’t get lost, or worse, never find what they’re looking for. Your website architecture is of great importance, and you need to give it all the attention it deserves.
Ideally, you don’t want all your different content clustered in one place. It might even be a good idea to start a blog to maintain long-form content instead of putting it on your service pages. Separate news content from blog content, and your visitors will be grateful that they don’t have to sift through various pages before getting the info they need.
Step 3. Merge Content Into Masterposts
Masterposts go a long way towards helping visitors navigate your website, especially if you have a lot of content to offer them. These posts are collections of information and links put together in one place. Making these posts can take a long time and is a massive job, so you must plan it well.
Step 4. Refresh Stale Content
It can be quite a big task — refreshing your old, stale content — because it’s likely that you put a lot of time into content that no longer offers anything to your audience. If your content is really, really stale, as in its growing mold, you have a big task ahead of you, unfortunately.
One of the first things you can do to breathe some new life into your content is simply give them fresh, eye-catching headlines. Think about what you’re offering your visitors and audience. Use that to come up with hard-hitting headlines.