It’s not uncommon for organizations and businesses to feel starved of content these days, but what happens when the very content they’ve created is holding back their site? When it’s time to audit your site’s content, it’s good to keep a sharp mind and a be willing to cut anything that isn’t helping your site’s performance.
Furthermore, if you take the time to improve the content that’s left, you may also find that Google see’s your site a little more favorably.
We’ve used this strategy with a number of clients. Including CB World, which wound up seeing traffic increases after choosing to leave blogging behind. And, Auto Body Toolmart, who not only pruned poorly performing pages but also improved those remaining.
Client: CB World
CB World carries one of the largest selection of radios, antennas, mounts, and other CB accessories available online.
After reviewing their site, we found that a neglected and unnecessary blog was doing more harm than good for this retailer. Blogs are fantastic marketing tools when they provide lots of value to the reader. This was not the case with CB World’s blog, and without the investing in more resources it was unlikely to improve.
The decision was made to get rid of the blog and migrate five or six posts that were driving traffic as authoritative articles to the main site. We also redirected the rest of the URLs (approx. 100-200) that were of lower quality to related category pages.
The result?
After migrating pruned pages from the blog to the main site, organic traffic immediately went up 4.93%, organic transactions up 4.65% and organic revenue increased by 32.12% with sustained results.
As you can see in the above graph after the change was made in September, traffic stayed higher overall than the previous year before the changes had been made. By cutting out pages that weren’t doing any good, the organic traffic increased.
Though there were a few good pieces of content on the blog, they didn’t have the resources to produce a regular, high-quality blog. By making the move to get rid of a blog that had little to no ROI, Inflow was able to help CB World increase their bottom line.
Client: Auto Body Toolmart
Auto Body Toolmart has sold tools and equipment directly to businesses and consumers for over 30 years and transitioned from a print catalog to eCommerce.
They saw a sharp decline in revenue and organic traffic over the summer of 2015 and came to Inflow to try to figure out what was happening and how to fix it.
Performing a thorough Content Audit uncovered that there were thousands of pages that had not driven any organic traffic Year to Date (YTD) by the end of September 2015. A situation like that is a classic example of thin content and index bloat. Inflow pruned these pages, which removed them from Google’s index.
In addition to identifying the pages for removal, the Content Audit also helped prioritize 1,300 top performing pages for improvement and approximately 8,000 pages that could be improved later.
For the second phase of the project, Inflow worked with a team of copywriters to rewrite content on the first 1,300 pages identified for improvement. Content issues for the product pages included empty product descriptions, thin content and duplicate content coming from manufacturer descriptions.
The results?
Revenue went up more than 28% within the weeks following the massive pruning of underperforming product pages.
And sessions increased by about 31% during the same time period.
From there, we took a look at their content and determined what improvements needed to be
made.
Product Page Traffic Update
We’ve updated the organic metrics for the rewritten product pages.
- Organic search traffic: +35,668 visits
- Organic search transactions: +112 transactions
- Organic search revenue: +$40,421.87 revenue
There were only 22 URLs (out of 605 total rewritten and published product page URLs) that are not showing any organic traffic for the Oct. 6, 2014 through March 1, 2015, time range at all. It appears that at least some of them are older versions of different/newer versions of ones that have been rewritten.
However, even if we remove these URLs from the analysis entirely, the traffic increase is still +33,868 visits.
Desktop Only
Since mobile traffic wasn’t tracked during the Oct. 6, 2014 through March 1, 2015, time range, we wanted to look at just desktop traffic. This isn’t a completely fair comparison, however, since mobile traffic has grown over the years and is contributing to the site’s recent organic traffic success.
- Organic search traffic: +8,002 visits
- Organic search transactions: +33 transactions
- Organic search revenue: +$29,850.60 revenue
Even just looking at desktop traffic, the growth is still very notable and positive.
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