We live in a digital era, and any business that doesn’t have an online presence is missing out on a huge part of its market. That’s why you must have an SEO strategy.
The primary purpose of any SEO strategy is to make your websites rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) so your audience can find your business. Google holds the monopoly here, with more than 86% of global desktop search traffic. So, you need to impress Google, and high-quality content is one of the most important factors the search engine considers to rank your pages.
But how do you consolidate your website content into high-quality content? Read on; we’ve got a lot of advice to share!
Why You Should Consolidate Your Content
Even the best SEO content will eventually become less effective and relevant. You have to regularly assess your website content to make sure it offers value to your audience. If there’s no value, there’s no point in the content existing.
Consolidating your content will help you:
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly and Easy to Navigate
Mobile users account for a huge part of search engine traffic. As of 2021, mobile devices were responsible for over 50% of all internet traffic across the globe. Meeting expectations for your mobile visitors is crucial.
Did you know that one in three customers will abandon your brand after just one bad experience, even if they love you? Keeping your mobile visitors happy is something you cannot neglect. Even Google is taking note of mobile users and making their experience a focus for the future.
You can use many tools to help you ensure your website is mobile-friendly and optimized for a fantastic user experience. For example, this site lets you test how mobile-friendly your website is, and here Google can help you enhance your website.
Prevent Keyword Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is more than just a buzzword and it’s important to make sure you’re not guilty of it. Cannibalization of keywords is when you ‘cannibalize’ your own results by splitting links, content, CTR, and conversions between two pages that should actually be one.
When you cannibalize keywords, you ask Google (or other search engines) to weigh your pages against each other and choose which one will work best with the matching keyword.
For example, suppose your website is an e-commerce site selling clothes, and ‘clothes’ is your only target keyword. In that case, you’re telling Google that every page is about clothes, regardless of whether they’re casual clothing, summer wear, or clothes for winter.
Rather than making the most of more valuable longer-tail keywords like ‘winter wear’ or ‘summer dress,’ you’re competing against yourself for one very broad keyword. You don’t want that. Doing so doesn’t show Google the actual value of your knowledge and content. As a result, your site’s authority suffers.
Improve Content Quality
You probably know by now that your content needs to be top-notch, or you won’t get the kind of engagement you want. High-quality content is much more likely to get people’s attention and keep them interested.
Personalized content is especially important to visitors — they want to feel special. It’s so crucial that companies that kept a finger on the pulse of their personalization strategies saw an increase in sales of 19%, on average.
Your content needs to be valuable and contain no fluff that wastes your visitors’ time. Therefore, the written text must be readable and entertaining, and your keyword research game must be unbeatable.
Write content that will captivate your audience and make them look up to you as a brand. Be compelling, and you’ll see that they keep coming back for more. They may even share it with their friends.
How to Consolidate Website Content Step-By-Step
Now that you know the value of consolidating your website content, it’s time to show you how to get started.
Step 1. Identify and Delete Bad Content
You likely started making content before you really knew how to do proper keyword research or create amazing content. That’s okay; you can still do something about that old content, as long as you’re willing to look with a critical and unbiased eye.
Here are some types of content to watch for:
Thin Content
Thin content is basically all the content floating around on your website that has no value. You need to go through all your content and find any articles that just don’t add value to your website. Any content that will be seen as inferior by Google (and other search engines) has to go.
Here are a few ways to identify thin content on your website:
- It was made using black-hat SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, etc.)
- The content was copied from another site or sites
- There isn’t much in length — this could be just a definition or a simple answer to a question
- The content is badly written or full of errors and bad grammar
Duplicate Content
Chances are you have duplicated content, not because you created the same content repeatedly, but because other pages have the same kind of content. This isn’t a big problem, as long as your content isn’t word-for-word the same as someone else’s.
To avoid this issue, make sure you add your own touch of personality to every page of your website, even the Terms and Condition section.
Poorly Performing Content
This is any content that isn’t performing well and doesn’t do your website any favors or bring in any traffic. You are likely to have many pages that just don’t do what they were made to do. You can update and refresh these nearly-dead pages of content or simply delete them and focus on making new content.
Outdated Content
Outdated content can happen to anyone, and it’s likely it’s happened to you. Your website could have many outdated blogs, articles, and other content that is no longer relevant or accurate.
There may be pages that discuss outdated trends or mention statistics that have since then changed. This kind of content can put your brand in a bad light if visitors see it and think you can’t be bothered to give them factual content. You can either remove this content or spend some time refreshing and improving it.
Step 2. Group Remaining Content by Topic
Every good blog or website needs to be decently organized so visitors don’t get lost, or worse, never find what they’re looking for. Your website architecture is of great importance, and you need to give it all the attention it deserves.
Ideally, you don’t want all your different content clustered in one place. It might even be a good idea to start a blog to maintain long-form content instead of putting it on your service pages. Separate news content from blog content, and your visitors will be grateful that they don’t have to sift through various pages before getting the info they need.
There are several elements to your website architecture to address, such as the navigation (is it user-friendly?) and the hierarchical structure (is it logical?). Every folder and subfolder in your URL makes it easier for search engines to gain more insight into the context of your pages.
When you organize your website, make sure to focus on enabling visitors to find whatever they’re looking for with ease. Typically, you want your website users to find what they need in three clicks, or they’ll get frustrated and leave.
Topic clusters are also a good idea because they will help you increase your traffic from Google. This kind of structure shows that you have high-level topics on your website, which tends to impress search engines.
Step 3. Merge Content Into Masterposts
Masterposts go a long way towards helping visitors navigate your website, especially if you have a lot of content to offer them. These posts are collections of information and links put together in one place. Making these posts can take a long time and is a massive job, so you must plan it well.
You could manage your project with a Gantt chart because it will make it easier to break down complicated tasks into more manageable chunks. Doing this could save you a lot of time and a headache or two.
Additionally, you can get creative with your masterposts. Consider videos, podcasts, and infographics. Or, you can even create a course as an alternative to a text-based masterpost. This is a much more creative way to share your knowledge and information with your visitors and might even be more accessible than a traditional masterpost.
Step 4. Refresh Stale Content
It can be quite a big task — refreshing your old, stale content — because it’s likely that you put a lot of time into content that no longer offers anything to your audience. If your content is really, really stale, as in its growing mold, you have a big task ahead of you, unfortunately.
One of the first things you can do to breathe some new life into your content is simply give them fresh, eye-catching headlines. Think about what you’re offering your visitors and audience. Use that to come up with hard-hitting headlines.
Rather than saying ‘we’ or ‘us,’ say ‘you.’ Use strong words that trigger emotional or psychological responses, such as ‘easy’ and ‘free.’
You have to comb through your content to ensure that all of your content is up-to-date and still matters to your audience. Maybe even add a few newer statistics or research points. A quote from an expert in your field won’t hurt either.
Additionally, boost your on-page SEO by optimizing your content’s images and text for search engines. You don’t need to do this manually as SEO optimization tools can do the bulk of the work for you.
Step 5. Assess Your Results
All your work will be for naught if you don’t have an effective way to measure your results. How else will you know how effective your consolidation efforts have been?
Remember that consolidation takes a lot of effort and time, so be patient. Once you have a sound system in place, you’ll be able to monitor and keep track of results efficiently. Check your rankings regularly and continue to refresh your content.
Use the many different measuring tools to get a good insight into how your website is performing as you improve your strategies.
Tips for Effective Content Consolidation
We’ve shown you how to begin your journey to better SEO-focused content, but we’ve still got more to cover. Here are some tip-top tips to show you just how to consolidate your website content for impressive SEO growth.
1. Add Visuals
Visuals on websites are as important as salt in your food — you just can’t do without it. People respond better to visuals than written content. You can add visuals to your already polished web pages to give them more value and make them more attractive. You can also use visuals to liven up somewhat boring or stale content that needs to be updated.
You can’t add just any visuals, though. They need to make sense and be relevant. Infographics can also be great visual additions that engage your audience and help you provide information concisely.
GIFS can also be fun, as they give your pages a dash of humor and give your audience a peek at your sparkling personality. Although you have to use them sparingly or risk annoying visitors, don’t be shy and use a funny GIF every now and then.
2. Use Internal Links on Every Page
Internal links are excellent for connecting your content with other relevant content. This is also awesome for SEO. Adding a link to a specific page to your website’s navigation panel will increase its visibility, which leads to organic links.
Internal links also help guide your visitors through the sales funnel with more ease and efficiency. You could also add links with special content to give visitors more insight into products or services.
3. Optimize Your URLs
It’s important that every single web page has a single and unique URL. You can run into serious SEO problems if you have web pages with multiple URLs. For example, your home page could be www.myawesomesight.com and it might appear with several different variations like:
Search engine crawlers will see each of these URLs as a separate page but with identical content. This will confuse the search engine and dilute your backlink profile when websites have more than one version of a URL.
4. Fix Indexing Issues and 404 Pages
If you want your pages to be visible in organic search rankings, they need to be indexed by Google. Indexing issues and missing pages can become technical obstacles that prevent this from happening.
For example, if you have thousands of lines of HTML code before the actual content, Google will find it more challenging to find out what the page is about. So you must streamline your code.
5. Use Your Customer Journey as a Guide
Your customer journey could serve as a good guide on how to plan your content. Create content that goes for the top of the funnel when your audience needs answers, ideas, and solutions.
The middle of the funnel is where people compare their options and decide which one to choose. Here, you should convince your audience that you are the best solution to their problem.
The bottom of the funnel is when your audience is ready to make their decision. Customize your content so that the right person finds it at just the right time.
6. Leverage Pillar Pages
Pillar pages offer a great way to consolidate your website content for SEO. Don’t be shy to add infographics and related videos to your pages to entice your visitors to stay longer and click on the right links. When you optimize your pillar pages, you can satisfy the preferences of different parts of your target audience, which is always good for business.
Consolidate Your Website Content Like a Rockstar
We’ve now given you all the information and tips you need to be awesome at consolidating your website for SEO growth. The ball is in your hands.
Will you take a shot and score some points for your SEO strategies or continue to dribble and risk losing the ball altogether?
You’ve got this. Just don’t be afraid to put in some effort and refer back to this guide in case you need inspiration!
This article was written by Mark Quadros, a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content. On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIN or twitter.
