Posted on June 17, 2022 by Jason Wright New Content, New Websites, and New Challenges When it comes to content it should be quality over quantity, right? Welllllll it depends on the situation. New businesses with new websites often find themselves with a basic online presence with just a couple of pages like: Home About Services Contact You know what I’m talking about. We’ve all seen what I like to call “starter websites.” That’s what they are. Your brand new five-page website might look nice, but it’s not likely to reach anyone. Why? Wellllllllll most business opportunities are driven through organic search optimization and this means you’re a little beholden to what search engines want. Not All Websites Are Equal Not all websites are created equal. A five-page site will likely need 30 pages to 50 pages to get the search engine juices flowing. It’s only then that you can start curating, consolidating, and optimizing your website around what kind of content works for you and your audience. If you have a dental practice you might want a page for every service you offer like teeth cleanings, root canals, etc. You might also start up your blog and build content around commonly searched topics. It’s here where things can get a bit crazy. After a year or two of content production a few things happen: You’ve got a TON of service page content. Pages are linked inside of pages, with more links to more pages. There’s so much that you’ve forgotten about the content you’ve produced and therefore have three pieces with the same info linked up in different places. You have a blog that has hundreds of posts 🙂 and you’ve done the same thing as above. You’ve written about the same thing 47 times at this point. Without even thinking about it though, you keep growing the content of the site. Search rankings seem stable so you keep the ball rolling and don’t stop when maybe you should. Quality and quantity are both important. When it comes to the search game, you’re only going to be as good as the analysis. If you’re looking for ranking growth, it may be restricted by the fact that you’re doing too much. Scaling Back Content, So You Can Do More Content That Matters Sometimes the thing that’s preventing your site growth is the fact that you have so much content, and over time, it becomes less relevant. The longer it sits, the less Google cares. You start losing credibility, and that hurts your overall trust. Working through a website architecture exercise can help you isolate the content you have on your website. Pairing that with Google data can help you make more informed decisions. Recently, we removed over 100 blog posts from our own site and saw an immediate increase in our performance. This is because blog content that was over seven years old referenced updates, materials, websites, and news-ish things that aren’t relevant or don’t even exist anymore. Google saw that we had a stagnant site. A place where we upload content, set it, and forget it. That’s not what Google wants to see. We took all blog posts with limited traffic and impressions and removed and redirected them to other locations on our site. This change boosted our keyword placement by more than 60 positions in some cases. That’s insane! And that was just the beginning. We do this kind of work for our clients all the time. It’s easy to lose track and forget about doing it for yourself, too. These changes will result in long-term ripple effects and continued growth. It’s not going to work for everyone. There’s a method and a deeply thoughtful process behind doing this. So don’t just go and delete all your old stuff. 😀 Instead, reach out to us, and we’ll take you in the right direction. 🙂 As always, thank you for reading and I’ll see you again next time! And definitely check out the architecture analysis blog post I updated recently!