Less Content, More Traffic. What?

In 2017, the SEO software company Moz realized their blog had become bloated, and much of their content was getting very little traffic. Moz had been publishing for over a decade and at this point they had thousands of articles. After surveying their content, Moz found that many of the articles were outdated, no longer relevant, not ranking, or getting zero traffic.

Moz’s response was to do something interesting; they deleted a third of their blog content, over 200 articles. Using Google Analytics as well as their own tools, Moz audited their blog to find posts with no traffic for 90 plus days, content with duplicate or overlapping topics, and low quality or thin content. From there they decided on one of three actions for each article; to delete it if it is unsalvable, merge the article with a related better post, or rewrite it if the post had potential but was out of date.

After sorting and deleting all of this content, what was the result? Shortly after, traffic increased by roughly 20%. With the trimmed down amount of content, Google was able to crawl their site more efficiently, users found less posts however what they did find was higher value content, and the overall authority of Moz’s content improved.

This example is a unique reminder that quality absolutely matters in SEO, and that creating value for users is the key of what content is created for. If a site has content that is not valuable, all it does is make your blog harder for Google to crawl, and make it more difficult for users to find content that is actually relevant and helpful to them. It may seem strange, but if you are trying to optimize your website for SEO, then cutting content may actually be the solution needed.