Content pruning

Following a merger of 8 sites into one, my team planned a content pruning project, where we unpublished 35% of editorial content, and updated 8%, resulting in 10% traffic boost and 30% conversion increase.

Skills and tools

Content strategy, Content editing, Jira, Sanity (CMS)

Process

Completed a content audit
Removed 30% of migrated articles
Updated articles with potential
Set up redirects for similar content

Goals

💎 Improve content quality

📈 Grow traffic

🪪 Increase leads

Results

17% YoY traffic boost
40-60% YoY conversion increase
Less internal competition
Higher average rankings in SERP

Context

My role

As the Content Team Manager at KEG, I owned the entire web editorial content strategy for educations.com.

The problem

The company had just completed a massive site merger, where 8 sites (which will be referred to as ”KAS” going forward) were merged into one, educations.com.

These sites used to be competitors, so this meant that educations.com suddenly had a lot of similar articles (similar topics, similar content), which led to traffic cannibalization.

To make matters worse, most of the articles from those 8 KAS sites hadn’t been updated in almost 10 years.

So, I decided to complete a content pruning project to improve the average quality of content, reduce similarity and therefore reduce content cannibalization.

The process

1. Complete a content audit

We completed a content audit, analyzing all KAS editorial content on based on traffic, conversions, queries the article is ranking for and ‘potential’ (subjective category).

The results of the audit are presented below, with per-site details omitted for NDA compliance.

2. Remove 'dead weight' content

The content that we planned to unpublish met a few criteria:

No impressions or traffic
No conversions
Content unrelated to the site niche

Following the content audit, we identified that 35% of content met these criteria, and would need to be unpublished.

All in all, we unpublished 678 articles, and the next step was to update content that had potential.

3. Updating articles with potential

There are essentially 2 ‘approaches’ of updating articles that were a part of the scope of this project:

“Editing” an article

Updating the article according to the set content style guidelines;
Editing it to adhere to the modern article structure.

“Merging” two articles

Taking the good/valuable parts of one article and moving them to another;
Editing the article with the merged content so it fits according to the guidelines above;
Setting up a redirect.

We use Jira for content planning, so that’s what I used for planning out these updates.

4. Setting up redirects for similar content

For all of the updated articles, we set up redirects from the ‘Secondary’ article to the ‘Primary’ one to make sure we’re keeping the impressions, traffic and backlinks from the ‘Secondary’ article.

Results

Below are some of the results and outcomes of this project, with exact numbers obfuscated for NDA reasons.

Overall, we saw a 5-15% year-on-year increase in traffic, and 40-65% increase in leads.

The results of the project were promising. This round of content pruning has helped us “comb through” the editorial side of the site and filter out less desirable content, positioning us well for strategy improvements and potential future rounds of pruning.

Google Sites

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