Mastering Content Pruning to Boost Ad Revenue

Search engines care a lot more about quality than quantity. For website publishers, having outdated or repetitive pages can actually hurt your site. It can waste Google’s time crawling your site, create confusing keyword competition between your own pages, and just give your visitors a bad experience.

That’s where content pruning comes in. It’s the simple process of removing or fixing up your underperforming content to solve these problems. This guide will show you why pruning is so important, how to do a content audit using your own data, and how to make it work with your ad strategy.

Why Content Pruning is a Game-Changer

Improve Your SEO and Help Google Find Your Best Stuff

Think of content pruning as tidying up your website. When you get rid of duplicate, old, or low-performing pages, you help your best content shine. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and focus on your most important pages.

Getting rid of low-value pages also helps prevent keyword confusion and signals that your site is full of unique, helpful information, which can lead to more organic traffic.

Make Your Visitors Happier

Nobody likes landing on a page with outdated or irrelevant information. Keeping your content fresh and helpful makes visitors happy, which means they’ll stick around longer and are more likely to come back.

A good user experience also sends positive signals to search engines. A big part of that experience is page speed. Did you know that 53% of mobile visitors will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load? Pruning and optimizing your pages helps keep your site speedy.

Boost Your Ad Revenue

It’s a simple formula: the longer people stay on your site, the more pages they view and the more ads they see. Publishers often see a nice jump in traffic after a good content cleanup.

However, you have to balance ads with performance. Too many ads or third-party tools can slow down your site and hurt the user experience. Pruning helps you find that sweet spot where your ads aren’t getting in the way.

What Does “Content Pruning” Actually Mean?

Content pruning isn’t just about hitting the delete button. It usually involves one of three actions:

• Refreshing: Take an outdated page and spruce it up with new information, data, and better keywords.
• Consolidating: Combine a few similar articles into one big, comprehensive guide. Then, use 301 redirects so you don’t lose any of that good link juice.
• Removing: Get rid of pages that are truly obsolete and offer no value. If a page has no traffic or backlinks, it might be time to say goodbye. For pages you remove for good, you can use a 410 status to tell search engines it’s gone forever.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to a Content Audit

1. Figure Out Your Goals

First, decide what you want to achieve. Are you trying to get more sign-ups or boost search traffic? Focus your audit on the parts of your site that will help you reach that goal, like your blog or product pages. Don’t try to audit your entire site at once without a clear plan.

2. Gather Your Data

To figure out what’s working, you need some numbers. Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to pull these metrics for your pages into a spreadsheet:

• URL & Page Title: To know which page you’re looking at.
• Organic Traffic: To see which pages bring in visitors from search.
• Bounce Rate & Time on Page: To see if people are actually sticking around and reading.
• Backlinks: To check which pages have authority from other sites.
• Keyword Rankings: To spot opportunities or see where pages might be competing with each other.
• Social Shares: To measure what content resonates with your audience.

3. Sort Your Content into Buckets

Go through your spreadsheet and assign each page to one of three categories:

• Refresh: These are pages that have potential. Maybe traffic is declining, but they have good backlinks. They just need an update with fresh info, new images, or better internal links.
• Consolidate: If you have several posts on the same topic, merge them into one powerhouse article. Set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.
• Remove or Deindex: These are pages with no traffic, no backlinks, and no real purpose. If a page offers no value, it’s safe to delete it.

4. Take Action: Update, Merge, or Remove

Now it’s time to do the work.

• For refreshing: Add new stats and examples, make the content easier to read, and optimize your titles and descriptions.
• For consolidating: Plan out the new, combined article so it flows well and covers everything a user would want to know. Don’t forget to update internal links to point to the new page.
• For removing: Make sure you set up redirects properly and remove any internal links that point to the deleted pages.

5. Check Your Page Speed

Pay attention to your Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID/INP, and CLS). A fast site is a successful site. You can improve speed by removing non-essential scripts, compressing your images, and using lazy loading for ads.

6. Watch Your Results and Repeat

Keep an eye on your traffic, keyword rankings, and revenue after you’ve made changes. It can take a few months to see the full impact, so be patient. It’s a good idea to do a content audit regularly, maybe once a quarter for big sites or once a year for smaller ones.

A Few Final Tips

• Don’t Delete Your Greatest Hits: If an article has great backlinks or is timeless, update it instead of removing it.
• Start Small: Don’t try to prune your entire site at once. You might accidentally remove something important. Focus on the lowest-performing content first.
• Use the Right Tools: Tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush can help you quickly find pages that aren’t doing well.
• Think About Ads: When you’re updating a page, think about the best places for ads. Make sure they aren’t slowing down the page or annoying your visitors.

What’s Next?

At the end of the day, content pruning is about making your website better for both users and search engines. By cleaning up your old content, you’re telling Google that your site is a source of quality information. When you combine this with a fast-loading site, you’ll be on your way to more traffic and better ad revenue.

Ready to boost your site’s revenue? Partner with MonetizeMore.

If you want to take your content strategy and ad earnings to the next level, MonetizeMore can help. We assist publishers in maximizing their revenue with advanced ad tools like PubGuru and Traffic Cop. Our experts can help you audit your content, set up lazy loading for ads, and find the perfect balance between monetization and page speed. Visit MonetizeMore or book a call to get started today!

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