Clean Up Your Website: Find SEO Success by Content Pruning

Clean Up Your Website: Find SEO Success by Content Pruning

by Ree Content Marketing SEO UX

As a solopreneur, every minute you spend on your website counts. Are you wasting time on content that’s actually hurting your SEO?

Content pruning is the process of removing or improving low-quality, outdated, or duplicate pages from your website to boost overall site performance.

Think of it as cleaning out your digital closet—keeping what works and tossing what doesn’t serve you anymore.

“Less is more” rings true in SEO—prune unhelpful content and watch your important pages grow. Removing old or weak web pages often leads to better search rankings. When you use content pruning as part of a content audit, you can boost traffic, streamline your site, and help search engines focus on your best work.

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Contents

You might think having more content is always a good thing, but that’s not the case.

Why Content Pruning Matters for Your Site

When I first started my business, I thought a bigger blog meant more traffic.

I was wrong. More content doesn’t necessarily equal better SEO results.

Google’s algorithm focuses on quality over quantity, which means weak pages can actually hurt your site’s authority.

According to a recent case study, HomeScienceTools.com saw a 64% increase in strategic content revenue after removing just 200 underperforming blog posts. That’s impressive results from deleting content, not adding it.

How much could your business benefit from a 64% increase in revenue? A lot, I bet.

Common types of content to prune

If you’re ready to get started, you need to know what kinds of pages to look for:

  • Thin content: Pages with little useful information
  • Outdated posts: Content with old dates or incorrect facts
  • Duplicate topics: Multiple pages targeting the same keywords
  • Zero-traffic pages: Content that gets no visits or engagement

Taking action to remove or improve your content is a crucial part of a full website review. The key is finding pages that drain your site’s SEO power without giving anything back in return.

Benefits you’ll see from pruning content

So, what’s in it for you? A clean website leads to some amazing results.

Content pruning plays a major role in comprehensive website and content audits. When you remove content with no value, you’re essentially telling search engines to focus on your best content instead of wasting time on weak material.

Robotic spider crawling the web with papers

Here’s what happens when you clean up your site:

A case study by Seer Interactive shows the real impact of content pruning. Their client experienced declining traffic for five years straight. After removing 14,000 low-value pages, they achieved a 23% increase in organic traffic year-over-year.

Imagine what a 23% traffic increase could do for your business.

Steps to Prune Your Website

Ready to clean up your site? Here’s a simple process that works for websites of any size.

4 steps to prune your website content

Conduct a full content inventory

Start by creating a complete list of all your pages. You can use tools like:

  • Google Analytics for traffic data
  • Google Search Console for search performance
  • Screaming Frog for technical crawls
  • Your content management system (CMS) export for a basic page list

Export everything into a spreadsheet so you can analyze the data easily. (I’ve listed more tools further in this article.)

Review analytics to find problem pages

Look for pages that meet these criteria:

  • Less than 50 organic sessions in the past 12 months
  • Fewer than 50 search impressions
  • No backlinks from other sites
  • High bounce rates with short time on page

CNET’s recent content pruning experiment shows how powerful this can be. They removed thousands of articles and saw a 29% increase in organic traffic in just two months.

What could a 29% traffic increase could do for your business in two months?

Make decisions about each page

For every underperforming page, you have four options:

  1. Keep as-is: High-quality content that just needs time
  2. Update: Good topics that need fresh information
  3. Merge: Combine similar pages into one stronger piece
  4. Delete: Remove pages that serve no purpose

Don’t rush this step. Take time to evaluate each page’s potential value.

To make sure you get the best results, it’s smart to follow a clear process that we’ll go over next.

Best Practices for Effective Content Pruning

Source: Styled Stock Society

Following a clear process helps you avoid mistakes and get better results from your pruning efforts.

Keep a regular schedule

Content pruning works best as an ongoing process, not a one-time cleanup.

You should review your content every quarter, or 6 to 12 months as part of your regular SEO maintenance to prevent low-quality content from building up over time and keep your site performing at its best.

Use a systematic approach

The most successful content pruning follows these steps:

  1. Inventory: List all your content
  2. Audit: Analyze performance data
  3. Decide: Choose what to keep, fix, or remove
  4. Act: Implement your changes carefully

Follow this methodical approach so you don’t accidentally delete valuable content or create technical difficulties.

When you delete pages, always set up 301 redirects to send visitors and search engines to relevant replacement content. This preserves any SEO value the old page had.

Also check for:

Avoid These Common Pruning Mistakes

Source: Inquivix

Even with a good plan, it’s easy to make pruning mistakes. Here are the biggest pitfalls to watch out for.

Removing valuable pages that need updates

Don’t delete content just because it’s old. Some pages have good bones or evergreen content, but need fresh information or better optimization.

Before removing any page, ask yourself:

  • Does this topic still matter to my audience?
  • Could I make updates to improve this content instead of deleting it?
  • Are there any valuable backlinks I’d lose if I delete this?

Source: Bluehost

One of the costliest mistakes is deleting pages without setting up proper redirects. This creates 404 errors and frustrated users. Always redirect deleted pages to the most relevant existing content on your site.

Not involving stakeholders

Content pruning can affect other parts of your business. For instance:

  • Marketing campaigns may link to pages you’re considering for removal.
  • Sales teams might reference specific articles.

Since solopreneurs make all the decisions, you don’t have a team to notify before making major changes and deletions. Just be sure to document your decisions in case you ever decide to outsource.

Make Content Pruning Easier with These Tools

Source: Webgator

The right tools can speed up your content audit and help you make better decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of.

Essential analytics tools

Start with these free options:

  • Google Analytics: Shows traffic, bounce rates, and user behavior
  • Google Search Console: Reveals search performance and indexing issues
  • Screaming Frog: Crawls your site for technical SEO problems

For deeper analysis, consider paid tools like:

  • Ahrefs: Comprehensive SEO data and competitor research
  • SEMrush: Keyword tracking and content gap analysis
  • Clearscope: Content optimization and performance insights

Simple scoring systems

Create a simple point system to evaluate each page:

  • Traffic: 0 to 10 points based on monthly visitors
  • Engagement: 0 to 10 points for time on page and bounce rate
  • Links: 0 to 10 points for backlinks and internal links
  • Relevance: 0 to 10 points for topic alignment with your goals

Pages scoring below 15 to 20 points are good candidates for pruning.

Organizing your audit data

Use spreadsheets to track your decisions and results. Include columns for:

  • URL and page title
  • Current performance metrics
  • Action taken (keep, update, merge, delete)
  • New redirect URL (if applicable)
  • Implementation date

This documentation helps you track results and avoid repeating work.

Wrap Up

Content pruning is a smart way to strengthen your SEO and help your site’s best content shine. Include regular audits to review and trim low-quality content, to keep your site health and support higher search rankings.

It may seem like a big job, but remember, every small step you take to improve your website’s health is a win for your business. By focusing on quality, you’re not just improving your SEO; you’re building a stronger, more efficient business that works for you.

Try content pruning in your next website audit for greater visibility.

References

Ashbridge, Z. (2025). Content pruning: Boost SEO by removing underperformers. Search Engine Land. Retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/guides/content-pruning

Content Pruning: Remove Low-Quality Content to Improve SEO. (2025). Conductor. Retrieved from https://www.conductor.com/academy/content-pruning/

Content Pruning Efforts Content Pruning. (2023). Seer Interactive. Retrieved from https://www.seerinteractive.com/work/case-studies/content-pruning-efforts-help-reverse-traffic-loss

Deleting Website Content? SEO Best Practices. (n.d.). Slim SEO. Retrieved from https://wpslimseo.com/deleting-website-content-seo-best-practices/

Goodwin, D. (2023). Improving or removing content for SEO: How to do it the right way. Search Engine Land. Retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/improving-removing-content-seo-guide-430571

Gray, T. (2022). Content Pruning Case Study: How This Online Store Increased Strategic Content Revenue by 64%. Inflow. Retrieved from https://www.goinflow.com/blog/content-pruning-case-study/

Højris Bæk, D. (2024). Content Pruning Case Study: CNET search data suggests it works. SEO.AI. Retrieved from https://seo.ai/blog/content-pruning-case-study-cnet

Huang, B. (2024). What is Content Pruning and Why it Matters for SEO. Clearscope. Retrieved from https://www.clearscope.io/blog/what-is-content-pruning

Patel, N. (2024). Examining a Content Pruning Case Study. BacklinkManager. Retrieved from https://backlinkmanager.io/blog/examining-content-pruning-case-study/

Content Gap Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for Better SEO

Content Gap Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for Better SEO

by Ree Content Marketing Copywriting SEO

Are you creating content, but still feel like you’re falling behind your competition? You publish blog posts, update your site, but it seems like everyone else is getting more traffic and ranking higher on Google.

Do you know exactly what your audience is searching for, that you haven’t covered in your content? A content gap analysis is a powerful way to find those hidden opportunities as a clear roadmap to attract more visitors with your content.

Let’s go over a 4-step process to find these gaps, fill them with valuable content, and grow your audience.

Contents

What Is a Content Gap Analysis?

It’s a great question, and the answer is simpler than you might think. A content gap analysis is a powerful way to find opportunities for your business.

A content gap analysis finds topics and keywords important to your audience that your business doesn’t cover. It usually involves looking at the keywords your competitors rank for in search results that you don’t.

The goal is simple: identify holes in your content that your audience needs you to fill. Creating useful resources builds trust and authority with potential customers.

Think of it like a grocery store owner checking a rival’s aisles. If they see customers constantly buying a popular brand of organic granola that they don’t stock, they’re missing out on sales. That’s called a “product gap.”

You’re doing the same thing, but with information. You’re looking for information your audience wants, but they can’t find on your site.

Content strategies must be hyper-focused on customer needs to be effective. A content gap analysis is the most direct way to align your strategy with your audience’s needs.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at how this can help your search engine optimization (SEO) and make your content work harder for you.

How Content Gap Analysis Affects Your SEO

Conducting a content gap analysis is a core part of a smart SEO and content strategy that delivers real results. It helps you stop creating content based on guesses and start making data-driven decisions that directly impact your growth. Here’s why it’s so important.

Find new keyword opportunities

Think you know all the important keywords for your industry? There’s always more to discover.

A content gap analysis uncovers valuable keywords your competitors are using to attract visitors—visitors that could be yours. These are often long-tail keywords or specific questions that show a user is further along in their buying journey.

Long-tail keywords (phrases of 3+ words) make up a significant portion of all Google searches. These less-competitive phrases often have higher conversion rates because the user’s search intent is much more specific. By finding gaps, you’ll also find these high-intent long-tail keywords.

Different types of content gaps

There are four types of content gaps you can address to be sure that your content strategy is thorough and promotes conversions:

  1. Keywords: Searches your competitors rank for, but you don’t.
  2. Topics: Categories and subtopics relevant to your audience that you’ve not addressed.
  3. Audiences: Segments of your target market whom you’ve neglected.
  4. Formats: Content types like videos, blogs, case studies and podcasts your audience likes, but you don’t have.

Understand your audience

What questions are your potential customers asking? What are their biggest problems? A content gap analysis helps you get a clearer picture of what your audience needs at every stage of their journey. By seeing what topics are popular on competitor sites, you get direct insight into the conversations happening in your industry. This allows you to create content that truly resonates and helps people.

Let’s say for example that you’re a B2B software company, and you see your main competitor has an entire section of their blog dedicated to “integrations with other software.” If you have no content on this topic, you could address this gap by creating a series of articles on how their product works with other popular tools, and get an increase in qualified leads from your blog within a few months.

Outperform competitors

To get ahead, you have to be better than your competitors and cover the topics they’ve missed.

You can systematically cover topics your competition already ranks for, but you can create more comprehensive, up-to-date, and helpful content to win the top spot on Google. You can also find the “gaps within the gaps”—topics that none of your competitors are adequately covering. This analysis gives you a strategic advantage.

Competitor analysis is an important piece of your marketing and content strategy. It’s the foundation for identifying opportunities to gain a competitive edge in search rankings.

Improve the customer journey

The customer journey isn’t a straight line. People move from being aware they have a problem, to considering different solutions, to making a final decision. You need content that supports them at every stage.

Source: Talkative

A content gap analysis helps you see if you’re missing content for a critical stage. For example, you might have great blog posts for the “awareness” stage, but no comparison guides for the “consideration” stage.

Ensuring a seamless customer journey with helpful information at each touchpoint can significantly increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Customers who receive helpful content throughout their journey are more likely to become loyal brand advocates. Filling your content gaps can help you do that.

4 Steps to Content Gap Analysis

Now that you understand why it’s so important, let’s get into the how. Here’s a four-step process to find and fill the gaps in your own content strategy.

Step 1: Analyze Your Competitor’s Content

What’s already working for others in your space? Let’s find out, using SEO tools to get a data-backed look at your competitors’ content performance.

First, identify your SEO competitors. These are websites that consistently show up on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for.

Next, use an SEO tool to do the heavy lifting. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz have specific “gap analysis” features built for this exact purpose. These competitive analysis tools are essential for your digital marketing strategy, saving you hundreds of hours of manual research.

Source: Semrush

Here’s a typical workflow using Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool:

  1. Enter the domains: Input your own website’s domain and the domains of up to four of your top SEO competitors.
  2. Run the analysis: The tool will compare the keyword profiles of all the websites.
  3. Find the gaps: Filter the results to show keywords where your competitors rank (e.g., in the top 10 results), but your site does not. Semrush has a “Missing” filter perfect for this.

This process will give you a spreadsheet full of valuable keywords and topic ideas that are already proven to attract visitors in your industry. This data-driven approach removes guesswork and gives you a clear starting point.

Step 2: Map the Customer Journey

A content gap can also exist within your own site. You might be missing content for crucial stages of the customer journey, leaving potential customers stuck.

Think about the journey in three simple stages:

  • Awareness Stage: The person knows they have a problem but doesn’t know the solution yet. They are looking for educational, top-level information.
    Examples: “Why is my skin so dry in the winter?” “How to improve team productivity.”
  • Consideration Stage: The person now understands their problem and is researching different solutions or methods to solve it. Examples: “Hyaluronic acid vs. glycerin for dry skin.” “Asana vs. Trello for project management.”
  • Decision Stage: The person has decided on a type of solution and is now comparing specific products or services to make a purchase. Examples: “CeraVe Moisturizing Cream review.” “Best price on Asana business plan.”

Now audit your existing content. To do a content audit, create a simple spreadsheet and categorize your current articles, guides, and landing pages into these three stages. You’ll quickly see where the gaps are. Do you have dozens of “awareness” blog posts but no “consideration” comparison guides? That’s a huge content gap you need to fill to guide users toward a purchase.

Step 3: Use Keyword Research to Find Questions

Sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in the specific questions people are asking. These questions are a goldmine for content ideas because they tell you exactly what’s on your audience’s mind.

Source: Swarm Digital

There are several free and easy ways to find these questions:

  • Google’s “People Also Ask” (PAA) Box: When you search for a keyword, Google often shows a box with related questions. This is a direct look into what other users are searching for. Click on a question, and more will appear.
  • AnswerThePublic: This free tool takes your keyword and generates a visualization of hundreds of questions related to it, broken down by who, what, where, when, why, and how.
  • Forums: Search for your topic on these sites like Reddit and Quora and look at the discussions. What are people confused about? What problems are they trying to solve? The language is natural, giving you raw insight into your audience’s pain points.

For example, if your main topic is “email marketing,” you might discover from the PAA box that people are asking, “How often should a small business send emails?” or “What are the best free email marketing tools?” These are perfect topics for new articles that address a very specific need.

Step 4: Organize and Prioritize Your Ideas

By now, you should have a long list of potential content ideas from your competitor analysis, customer journey mapping, and question research. The final step is to organize these ideas and decide what to work on first.

Create a master spreadsheet for your content ideas. For each idea, include these columns:

Topic IdeaTarget/Focus KeywordStage of Customer JourneyMonthly Search VolumeKeyword DifficultyBusiness Relevance
(1 to 5)
How to Choose Project Management Softwarechoose project management softwareConsideration800Medium5
Asana vs. Trelloasana vs trelloConsideration2,500High4
Best Free Email Marketing Toolsfree email marketing toolsDecision5,000High3

Use this data to prioritize. A good approach is to look for topics with a sweet spot of:

  • High business relevance
  • Decent search volume (100 to 1,000 searches per month minimum)
  • Manageable keyword difficulty (KD)

Then group related topics into topic clusters to build authority on a subject and improve your internal linking structure. This ensures you’re creating content that will not only attract traffic but attract the right leads who are likely to be interested in your products or services.

Once you’re done, you’re actually not done. Measure the success of your new or updated content by tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions, and other important metrics.

Wrap Up

A content gap analysis takes the guesswork out of your content strategy. Instead of wondering what to write next, you’ll have a clear roadmap based on real data about your audience and competitors. Do a content gap analysis regularly to fill the holes in your content, meet your audience’s needs, and steadily grow your organic traffic.

References

Ahrefs. (2023). Ahrefs Keyword Explorer Data. Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. Retrieved from [https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer.

AirOps (2024). Content Gap Analysis: Types, Examples & Step-by-Step Guide. Retrieved from https://www.airops.com/blog/content-gap-analysis-examples

du Plessis, C. (2022). A Scoping Review of the Effect of Content Marketing on Online Consumer Behavior. SAGE Open, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221093042

Search Engine Journal. (2025). The State of SEO: A 2025 Report. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/state-of-seo/