Recently, I did a content audit on my website and had an 80%+ increase in organic traffic. This tutorial shows how to get more traffic from Google by deleting and redirecting content on your website.
Conventional SEO wisdom will tell you to publish more content to get more traffic. But that’s not always the case.
There’s an SEO strategy that has gained popularity called a content audit.
In its simplest form, it’s a way to get rid of underperforming, low-quality pages with the goal to improve the overall “health” of a website.
This is generally done by deleting pages (404) or redirecting/consolidating it with other relevant pieces (301).
But is deleting content a good idea?
John Mueller from Google has said,
“From my point of view, if you’re aware of low-quality pages on your website, then that’s something I’d try to fix and find a solution to, be that either removing those pages if you really can’t change them or, in the best case, finding a way to make them less low-quality and actually making them useful, good pages on your site”
Here’s a quick background on the website being audited in this tutorial.
A few years ago, Sam purchased a blog with around 1,000 pages in the sitemap. The topics were so widespread that if he deleted all pages outside of his chosen niche, he would have been left with around 12 pages.
So the goal of the first round of deleting pages was simple.
► Delete pages that don’t get a “meaningful” level of traffic.
► Redirect or consolidate pages that don’t get a “meaningful” level of traffic but have external backlinks.
► Manually review pages that are not getting a “meaningful” level of organic traffic and make some hard decisions.
This tutorial walks you through various scenarios that you’ll run into should you choose to perform a content audit on your website.
Now, this process can be extremely time consuming and the last thing you want to do is make mistakes and delete pages that are important to your business.
We created a template that you can download and input data for your own website.
→ How to Use ←
First, create your own copy of the template by clicking file – make a copy – save to your drive.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aBp4FjVeiumBCYYwn71mg4YRkeJExigZEbJuFZPVyFU/edit?usp=sharing
Next, you’ll need to import the following data:
– sitemap URLs
– traffic data from Google Analytics (watch the tutorial to understand which report and segments) – backlinks data from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool (top pages report).
After doing that, you’ll have a “master” sheet which will give you suggested actions based on your pages’ data.
From there, you can manually assess each page and see what the best course of action will be to trim your website of low-quality content.
After you’ve deleted and/or redirected your pages, you’ll need to make the on-page changes to remove all internal links pointing at these pages.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool, which will help you identify where these internal links are.
Try the template yourself, follow along with the tutorial, and proceed with caution before making any rash decisions.
Timestamps:
1:00 What is a content audit?
2:45 Learn how to vet your site’s pages
4:41 Consider deleting or redirecting some pages
6:25 Use our template for a content audit
7:12 Import your sitemap URLs into the spreadsheet
8:11 Export your GA data and link data over the past year
11:26 Vet your results taking our action suggestions into account
#organictraffic #seo #seostrategy
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