Do you have a big website with lots of pages, or an online blog? You need to make some “house-cleaning” from time to time to keep good rankings in Google! Do you know how?
Having a big website, like, for example, a blog, where you are constantly publishing content, may seem like a great idea for getting on that first page of Google´s results, as you always dreamt, right? Well, yes, and no. Yes, you need to have fresh, good quality content coming in on a regular basis – ultimately, the more pages, the more opportunities to rank. And no, having lots of pages without any order, in total chaos, can actually have the opposite effect and hurt you SEO-wise. The key here is to regularly do some “house-cleaning” on your website. Today we will tell you exactly what you need to do.
The problem with a bigger website is that the more pages you have, the more likely it is that your pages will be about similar topics and rank for similar keywords. But unless your website has some crazy domain authority (like Wikipedia, for instance), it is very unlikely that Google will let you have more than one place on its first page of results, and therefore only one of your pages will get to be shown. But for this to happen that page will need to compete not only with other websites, but also with the other pages of your website that have similar content. You are thus making the task of “ranking well” very hard to almost impossible.
To avoid this kind of problem, you need to understand that there is no such thing as “publish a page and forget”. You always need to do some maintenance work.
There are different ways you can go about it, so let us give you some ideas. You can apply just one of them, or combine them all for even better results:
1. Use the site structure technique. Identify the pages that are ranking for the same keywords. See the analytics of each one of their sessions and choose the best performing one. That page will be your “main” page for the topic of that target keyword. Now add links from all the other pages to your “main” page. This will show Google exactly what you need – all those pages are about the same topic, but one of them is more important than the others, so it’s supposed to rank better.
2. Delete old content. Yes, we feel your pain. You have dedicated hours to write good content and prepare the page, and you feel it deserves to stay. But if the content is old and not relevant anymore; if the page hasn’t been receiving any traffic for some time now; it is actually better to delete it. Just don’t forget to redirect (with a 301 redirect) that page´s URL to a new page that has similar content and can work as a good substitute.
3. But what if all the pages are still relevant and you cannot choose the “main” one? Don’t panic, there is a solution – merging the content. Take two, three or more older pages as inspiration and write one great piece of content that includes the information from all the others. Then put this new content on the best performing page (see Google Analytics to make this choice), redirect (with a 301 redirect) all the other pages to that chosen one with the new content. And voila! You have a fresh page that still uses the “SEO power” of all the old pages (being published on an old URL and the 301 redirects will ensure this) and you didn’t lose any piece of content by deleting a page.
These techniques seem time-consuming and they can be if you leave all these tasks to be done together, once a year. But if you regularly “book" some time on your diary to analyse the performance of your older pages and to do some maintenance, thus dividing the task into smaller fractions, you will actually go through it quite quickly.
When was the last time you analysed your website’s old pages? Do you even know how many pages your website has?
For more information, bespoke strategies and efficient digital marketing solutions, just contact the Clarity’s girls through info@yourdigitalclarity.com or visit our website at www.yourdigitalclarity.com.
