A Simple Step-by-Step Process to Prune Your Website Content

By Mitali Purkait Ghosh on December 17, 2025

“More is better” might be a good mantra, but not so much for websites.

An overloaded website, full of outdated, low-performing, or redundant content, can actually hurt your search rankings and user experience. How do SEO outsourcing companies in India solve it?

The answer is content pruning. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

What is Content Pruning for SEO?

Content pruning is the strategic process of reviewing, improving, consolidating, or removing low-quality, irrelevant, or obsolete content from your website. It’s similar to a gardener trimming a plant to remove dead or diseased parts so the healthy parts can flourish!

As a practice, SEO services in Kolkata use content pruning to help search engines crawl your site more efficiently. Additionally, it concentrates your link equity and ensures visitors only find the most valuable, up-to-date information. 

Steps of an Effective Content Pruning Strategy

Step 1: Perform Site-Wide Content Audit

You can’t prune what you haven’t assessed. So, the first step is to get a complete inventory of all your content. SEO outsourcing companies in Kolkata will use tools like Google Analytics or Google Search Console to gather data on every page. 

Key metrics to track include:

• Organic traffic
• Ranking keywords
• Backlinks
• Bounce rate and time on page

Step 2: Decide Which Content Needs Pruning

Analyze the audit data to identify underperforming content. Digital marketing companies in India focus on pages with:

• Low to zero organic traffic over a significant period
• Few or no backlinks or internal links
• Thin content, or pages with very little text
• Outdated information that is no longer accurate or relevant
• Duplicate or highly similar topics to other high-performing posts

Step 3: Check for Technical Issues

Before assuming the content itself is the problem, ensure there are no technical barriers to its performance. Digital marketing agencies in India use SEO tools to check for:

• Crawl errors
• Indexing issues
• Slow load speed

Step 4: Improve Content by Basic Changes

Some content doesn’t need a full overhaul—just a simple fix. Look for easy wins like:

• Update the publish date if the information is still accurate. Changing the date helps signal freshness to users and search engines.
• Replace or remove broken internal or broken links that lead to 404 pages. 
• Add valuable keywords, particularly long-tail keywords that AI Overviews are triggered by.

Step 5: Refresh Outdated Content

If a piece of content is strategically important but contains obsolete information, it needs a refresh. This is more intensive than basic changes:

• Add new data and statistics
• Update product information or screenshots
• Expand the depth by adding new sections of FAQs to cover the topic more comprehensively
• Improve readability by using shorter paragraphs, bullet points, and better formatting

Step 6: Consolidate Similar Content

This is among the most powerful pruning techniques. If you have more than 2 articles covering nearly the same topic, they are competing with each other.

• Identify the strongest-performing post
• Move all the unique, valuable content from the weaker to the stronger post
• Delete the weaker posts and implement a 301 redirect from the deleted URLs to the stronger, consolidated post

Step 7: Remove Low-Performing Content

For content that has no traffic, zero strategic value, and can’t be improved or consolidated, the final step is removal.

• Delete the page
• Implement a 301 redirect

For a healthy plant, pruning is crucial. This works somewhat similarly for your website. Regular content pruning, thus, is a vital component of ongoing site maintenance. 

If you want to pave the way for the highest-quality content to shine in search results, reach out to us at Digital Concepts today!

Mitali Purkait Ghosh

Mitali Purkait Ghosh, the Co-Founder of Digital Concepts, brings a wealth of knowledge and innovation to the marketing sphere. Mitali and her dedicated team offer unparalleled expertise in digital marketing and content writing, among other key online strategies.