How To Do Content Pruning for Your Construction Content?

As a construction website owner, you always think of new content to write and publish online. While it is great to create new content, it is equally important to focus on your existing construction content. You need to be aware that not all of your content is high-performing. Too many low-performing blog posts and pages on your site is not good for your construction business or even for Google.

Any similar, outdated, and thin content can drag your website down in search results. What could solve this issue? A process called content pruning can help you prevent this problem from occurring.

In this blog, let’s learn about content pruning together. Discover many benefits and the four-step guide to successfully pruning your content.

What is Content Pruning?

If you know gardening stuff, like trimming a hedge, it is the same as content pruning. You cut away the dry and dead pieces so the healthy branches have room to grow and thrive. The same goes for your construction content.

Content pruning is a form of content audit or maintenance on your construction website. It mainly focuses on content that is not performing well. This means low traffic, low conversion pages, or pages with duplicate content. Even some of your blog posts that are no longer relevant can be included.

Content pruning aims to eliminate these pages and show your visitors and users relevant, rich, and updated content. Google loves unique, fresh, and high-quality content. Therefore, pruning your content is one of the best SEO practices!

The Benefits of Consistent Content Pruning

Google’s latest core update has sparked an immediate need for content pruning. That is why we strongly encourage you to prune your content and remove the old ones to get the maximum benefits.

Here are some of the biggest benefits of content pruning for your construction content:

Better overall quality: Pruning your content regularly can add value and increase the overall quality of your website.
Better distribution of link authority: Pruning your content ensures that your link authority flows directly to the pages with the most potential.
Wiser crawl budget spending: Pruning your construction content makes it much easier for Google bots to crawl your website. By removing the “dead weight,” Google can index more of your construction content and make each crawl more meaningful.
Better user experience: Content pruning can result in a good user experience for your website visitors, which is very important for search engines like Google.
Boost your SEO efforts: Your website’s improved user experience and enhanced overall quality affect its search engine ranking.

How to Prune Your Content?

Finally, we will walk you through the whole process of pruning your content. While content pruning seems like a complex process, it only requires four steps. Depending on the amount of pruning your construction content needs, these steps usually require a significant amount of time and effort.

1. Create a content inventory

Before you begin pruning your content, you must have a comprehensive insight into all your content assets. So, a content audit must be conducted. A content audit lets you dive deep into your entire content strategy, making it easier to spot any gaps in your plan and possible problems.

If your construction website is small and has only a handful of pages, you can complete the process manually. However, if it is larger, using tools like Google Analytics and Google Console is necessary.

For this initial stage, the main focus will be gathering as much information as possible. For every piece of content, you must list the following:

Article name
URL
Publication date
Primary keywords

2. Gather Performance Metrics

Once you have sorted and completed the content list, the next step is to evaluate its performance. You must determine how much value your content delivers to your construction website.

The exact metrics you track might vary depending on your content goals. In many cases, here are some key metrics you have to track:

Visits and conversions: These are the number of people visiting your page or the general level of traffic your website gets. You must track this metric and see how much it has changed in the last 6 to 12 months. This will help you determine whether your web pages lose customer appeal.
Internal and external links: A strong backlink network is key to your SEO standing. You need links to your web pages to help your target construction clients navigate your website. In the same way, you need backlinks from authority brands to help boost the credibility of your website.
Content value: The value of your content is one important thing you can easily assess and monitor yourself. Pay close attention to your published articles and blog posts. Evaluate each and find out whether it contains outdated information or not.
Social performance and engagement metrics: If your construction content gets a lot of engagement from your audience, it brings value and boosts your brand awareness. Find out how many people are engaging with and sharing your content online.
Other SEO issues: SEO-focused metrics can help you identify which content you must prune first. For example, if your page has a higher bounce rate, this can be a sign that you are not publishing the exact content your customers are looking for.

3. Choose What to Do with Your Content

You will decide for your existing content – Keep, Update, Kill! While it might be tempting to delete past content no longer relevant, you have other options. Some of your old content can still be useful. You just have to make a few tweaks to make it new and valuable to your audience.

Update: Consider updating your old content to meet your audience’s expectations and demands. Perhaps some parts of the content are still relevant. However, recognize the keyword usage, outdated research, and links that no longer work.
Improve thin content: You can improve any of your thin content in many ways. The first thing to do is to see it from an SEO perspective. You may want to rewrite the title, meta description, headline, subheadings, and image captions to make your content relevant again in the search results. Other ways include revamping your old content to make it a new one. This is where you can add some additional visual elements.
Repurpose your content: If you want to be creative on another level, you can repurpose your old content entirely. One of the best ways to repurpose content is to combine multiple old pieces into a lengthy article. Doing this can absolutely help fix underperforming pages.
Make content non-indexable: Another way to prune your content is to make your old content non-indexable so it will not appear in search results. You can opt for this move, especially if your content is useful but not necessarily for search.

4. Remove Outdated content

The last step of the content pruning process is outright removing it. You can easily do this by deleting or unpublishing your website’s content. Make sure to delete content that serves no value or will not improve anymore. If you have a few pieces of old content you want to delete immediately, take the process slowly.

Moreover, see how removing each piece of construction content affects your website. Monitor the changes. For good spacing, complete this process at least every few weeks.

How Often Should You Prune Web Content?

This is a very important question, and most opinions vary. After all, it is worth contemplating how often you must commit time to content pruning. Our team of experts at our agency suggests starting pruning every 3 to 6 months. If you have a much larger website with tons of pages, you must be serious about doing basic pruning tasks every month.

Also, you will be working more on your overall content strategy and structure consistently. If you do not have a content pruning strategy yet, here are some signs telling you to prune more often:

You are receiving comments about outdated information.
Your organic traffic has significantly dropped.
Your web pages are not ranking well on the search engines using their respective keywords.
Engagement on social media and other online channels is declining.

Start Pruning Your Content with ConstructionMarketing.io

Ready to get to the pruning process? Well, there are two options you can take to get started in content pruning and find out your most underperforming content. One, you can ask for professional help from a reliable construction marketing agency that conducts a content audit. Two, you can do things by yourself.

If you think you have no knowledge and skills in performing a content audit, the first option is clearly for you!

We are ConstructionMarketing.io,a full-service agency offering a wide range of digital marketing solutions. Our agency is on a mission to create an impactful online reputation for our clients using the latest strategies, marketing technologies, and creative content.

We offer a structured approach to content pruning. We identify, update, consolidate, and remove any underperforming content on your website – to significantly boost your site’s SEO performance. When you partner with us, you can access affordable SEO and content marketing services that include advanced strategies like content audit and pruning.

Aside from content strategy, we offer other solutions too:

Talk to us today! Discover how our agency can help your construction business achieve its digital ambitions!