Vibrant and active websites quickly show up on the search engine’s result pages. For small businesses or blogs, it is best to cut loose the dead weight by removing inactive and unnecessary pages from the site. It is excellent to have a minimum no. of pages on your website as only the most essential information should make it to search results.
Backlinks and referring domains are some of the most reliable ranking signals. In order to receive a higher ranking, it is crucial to build up a lot of backlinks. The more pages you have, the tougher and more complicated it gets. It can be easily backed by analyzing the SERPs for any competitive search query of top results. What they all have in common is a huge no. of backlinks and referring domains.
However, not just that it makes it easier and more effective to build links, there are more reasons why you should consolidate your content to improve your ranking on SERPs. Primarily, content consolidation refers to auditing the website content and combining all pieces involving similar topics into updated and relevant long-form web content. For example, many marketers who manage a blog have found that pages with more than 2K words rank much better than pages with lesser words. Content like in-depth guides, how-tos, and case studies look more credible and see more backlinks.
Content consolidation is crucial in boosting your SEO efforts for several reasons. It can help improve your website’s content strategy and let you make the necessary modifications to make your content more accurate, relevant, and precise. By consolidating content, you can also provide up-to-date information that helps establish you as an industry thought leader. Lastly, you can determine and eliminate duplicate content that can cause your website to be penalized by Google and other major search engines.
Let’s begin by looking at how we can optimize your website for higher ranking on SERPs with content consolidation.
Striping away dead-weight
Deleting the weakest pages of your site will make it lighter and more concentrated. You can begin eliminating pages that have poor SEO performance and negligible user engagement. To find out the weakest pages of your site, you can run a quick inventory and put together a list of all content pages on your website.
To find this out, you can export the list out of your CMS. In case you are running a website using WordPress, you can visit this resolved thread where you can find instructions on how to do it.
Now filter out the list for these two types of pages:
- Are not viewed by your website visitors
- Have no organic traffic
Pages that have no visitors
Why would you keep something on your website that no one looks at? Often, the number of orphan pages grows exponentially and impacts the ranking of your website. Orphan pages are pages that are not internally connected to other pages of your site.
You can use a Google Analytics account to find these pages. Go to the behavior section and click on All Pages. Select a time frame like a year or a month and then export it as a CSV file.
Use the VLOOKUP formula to match the list of your content pages with the number of page views they have received. This will give you a list of all your pages and the no. of page views they got over the selected time period.
You can arrange them in ascending or descending order as per your convenience. You can now quickly identify the pages that receive minimal or no page views. You can mark these pages for further review.
Either you can delete these pages, or if they have valuable information, then you can rework upon them. Internally link them with other pages with a similar topic or theme to create a topic cluster. Doing this can improve the chances of driving more visitors to these websites and improve search engine ranking over time.
Pages with no organic traffic
You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to extract this data. Google Search Console, along with organic visitors, also shows the number of impressions you get. Pages that have many impressions but no organic impression promise great potential.
To extract this data, you can work with the previous dataset. In this section, you need to look at clicks and impressions. To find it out, you need to filter pages that perform poorly by sorting the pages by the number of pageviews and clicks.
The pages with least no. show that they are dead, and no organic traffic is coming on them. You can either delete them or rework them.
With content consolidation, you can optimize your website content and, in turn, drive organic traffic to your pages. You can achieve this by learning the best practices for updating website content as you rework these pages. You can check out reputable websites and online resources to learn more about this.
Optimizing content pages for organic growth
By this time, either you have deleted unnecessary content from your website or marked content pages that need to be worked upon. We can look at three different ways of optimizing our content pages.
Check for Keyword search volume
If you want a higher ranking in SERPs then you need a lot of organic traffic coming your way. It is the most difficult thing to get organic traffic to flow through your site. However, you can ease your difficulty a little by selecting the right keywords.
A lot of people starting a blog are not even aware of focus keywords. Then there is a whole lot that assumes that by choosing a keyword, their task is half done. But despite selecting a good keyword, they are nowhere near the top search results. This is because most people choose keywords that have higher competition.
You need to search for keywords that have more search potential and lesser competition. There are a lot of tools that you can use to look for search volume and competitiveness like Ahrefs, SEMrush and KwFinder.
These tools, often based on data, show you the search volume and keyword difficulty, which shows how difficult it is to rank in top search results.
Organize your content in topic clusters
Many marketers have said this out of their experience that sites based on topic clusters rank better on search engines. This also keeps your website organized and easily navigable.
Topic clusters mean compiling content with similar topics or in pillars, where there is pillar content and then its subtopics exploring the various aspects of the topic in detail. For instance, if your pillar topic is “Website Development” then your subtopics can be;
- Tools for website development
- Best themes for novice website developers
- How to write cleaner codes for jank-free websites
This strategy results in in-depth guides, where a person can explore a topic in its full depth and dimension. Visitors spend more time on your website exploring a topic.
Optimize pages that bring you traction
You must have pages in your list that bring you some traction. Though it is not high, it still brings some traction showing it has potential. You can optimize these pages and expect far better results from them.
Add inbound links to connect more pages
Adding an inbound link in your content will connect more pages to your site internally. This is really good for SEO. Putting more internal links in your content will improve your ranking. Adding a link to a specific page to your navigation panel improves its visibility and, thus, organic rankings.
To implement an inbound link strategy, qualify the leads to know if they’re a good match for your website content and review all your content to decide which links you want to feature. Having a list of content can provide you with an overview of the types of content your website has, which is essential in spotting backlink opportunities. Also, consider embedding links to informative and eye-catching images and graphics. Remember, users are more likely to get attracted to content combined with images, infographics, and other visual representations.
Add engaging visuals
Compelling visuals improve user engagement. People respond positively to engaging and meaningful visuals. If you share a lot of numbers, then displaying them graphically can be an interesting way to hold the audience captivatingly and also provide them with easier ways to understand complex information.
You can use videos on your website too. Videos have a huge engagement rate and make up for the majority of trending content on the internet. Visitors stay for a longer duration on your website while engaged with video content. It improves your metrics like time on site and bound rate, which are significant factors in Google’s ranking algorithm.
Conclusion
As you move ahead in time, you will see how shredding your site of unnecessary weight will impact its rating positively. Pages that are dead and have poor performance also affect the ranking of other pages and the overall website.
Do your research and give time before creating content. You don’t have to rush in to create a whole lot of content. Step back and look at your larger objectives and see if your content is in sync with them.
