Create Or Cull? Streamlining Your Website For Better SEO

Every day, 2.7 million new blogs are posted online. Whichever way you look at it, that is a remarkable amount of new content being added to the internet every 24 hours. As content creators, it sometimes gives us pause for thought at just how barely-read those millions of posts are, particularly on top of the more static landing pages which remain unchanged for the best part of their existence.

If your site suffers from over-optimisation—ie: creating single pages for individual keywords—now might be the time to change your ways. With so much stuff on the internet, it can occasionally be hard to know what new posts are even worth writing. Here are some suggestions for how your site can get noticed by actually shouting more quietly than your competitors.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but less really can be more where content is concerned. Rather than split the keyword difference between many pages, it is more important to improve the quality of your site by condensing extraneous content into fewer, more relevant pages.

By conducting a crawl of a website, then using Google Analytics to compare this data with how much organic traffic each page receives, you can condense a great deal of your less frequently visited pages into a more manageable site structure. It also prevents pages on your site from competing with each other, and improving visibility on a wider basis.

One method of improving your page ranking is harnessing Google Trends. We have already discussed how Trends is a useful tool when it comes to content creation for blogs; you can search a date-specific topic or an event, and determine how far in advance people begin searching for it.

This also works if you are operating an e-commerce page. If your product comes out with a new line annually, create the page for next year’s line as soon as the current range is released. For example, even though nothing is known about the iPhone 8 (and there is not yet a dedicated iPhone page on Apple’s website), due for release in 2017, the search query already has a higher Google search volume than iPhone 7. Even if the page simply says that it is under construction, not only do you let people know that you have already started thinking about next year, but by building a page before your competitors, you have the potential to rank before them as well.

Customer reviews are becoming more frequently cited as a ranking factor, particularly those from Facebook, Yelp and other consumer review platforms. According to Moz’s most recent study on Local SEO, reviews are more significant to Google than social media shares, and the search engine has been well aware of the way black hat SEO has attempted to game their system when it comes to their importance. Consequently, it’s essential to harness the power of customer reviews, not only for search visibility, but to provide your site with new content.

Reviews allow your customers to engage directly with your site, and boost the conversation around your brand. Although social may count as a less significant ranking factor than reviews, reviews can lead to your product page (and the reviews themselves) being shared on social media. Google has also stated that seller ratings improve a site’s click through rate by 17%—and since this information was released five years ago, it is almost guaranteed that that number has increased dramatically since.

One further benefit of using reviews as sources of content is that it will improve your long-tail keyword traffic. Given mobile search’s prevalence for question-based search queries, companies whose sites give users room to review their services are likely to benefit; after all, the people who are reviewing your products will be the same people who have purchased it in the first place. Taking inspiration from their choice of words and terms means that you can tailor your keyword optimisation around the language they use to discuss your product.

Allowing your content to be “outsourced” in this way, as well as being more selective about the onsite content you are generating, is ultimately going to be one of the best things that you can do for your website. By curating your blog posts more carefully, you can craft your message more effectively in a way that will have positive repercussions on your SEO.