How content consolidation improves your positions in the search results
This article is 6 years old — prices and terms may have changed.
To avoid duplicate content and a fall in traffic, content has to be updated regularly and the outdated parts removed. There is another way to solve the problem: combining content. That is what consolidation means, and with it you can improve a site's ranking and the experience of its visitors.
When should you consolidate?
If your brand has been creating content for some time, you will certainly reach the point where part of your new content overlaps with what already exists.
The second case. You may have several related articles that do not cover the subject deeply. Many webmasters and marketers are captured by the stereotype that more articles is always better. That is not so, and the problem here is not an obvious one.
If you do not watch for it, you can end up with several pages competing for the same search query. In most cases Google's algorithms aim to show no more than two results from the same domain for a given query. Which means that while you are probably already competing with other companies in the search results, you may also be competing with yourself. In such cases your best articles may get no traffic at all.
We also recommend reading: The b2b customer persona
Why should content consolidation be part of your SEO strategy?
Content consolidation can help you come back and raise your chances of reaching the top ten and the top three. Consolidation also helps your site earn more backlinks. The main factor is the quality of the content: more substantial articles are linked to more often. Besides, the links stop being scattered.
Consolidation also makes it easier for users to find information, and it helps you get rid of ineffective content, which often does more harm than good.
Still in doubt? Think about quality, not quantity. During a recent episode of the Google SEO Mythbusting series, Google's Martin Splitt was asked whether there is any sense in combining two similar articles into one. He answered that it would be useful.
Google itself applied this tactic when it combined six separate websites into Google Retail, which let it double the site's CTA rate and increase organic traffic by 64%.
When should content be consolidated?
Thin content. According to Splitt, Google may treat pages with little information — help centre pages covering a single question, for instance — as being of no value to users.
"I would try to group these things and structure them in a meaningful way," he said, noting that if a user has several interrelated queries, combining that information can make your pages more useful.
Duplicate content. In most cases Google does not penalise sites for duplicate content. For larger sites, though, having several URLs hosting the same content can waste crawl budget and weaken signals.
Crawl budget is the number of pages a search robot can scan in one visit.
That limits the search engine's ability to index and judge your pages. Even if your site is relatively small, identifying and removing duplicate content can improve the experience you give users.
There are many tools for finding duplicates. But Google's experts strongly advise going through a site yourself and identifying and analysing duplicates by hand. That matters because only then can you fully understand why they appeared and find the best way to remove them.
Outdated content. Every year brands and publishers create content predicting the trends of the year ahead. Yet 2020 turned out to be a year unlike any other, so most of those forecasts do not matter.
A user who comes across your post with outdated forecasts is more likely to leave your site without an order, a purchase or any other target action. Deleting outdated content from your site may be a better option than leaving it. You can also update the article with new forecasts and analysis and change the publication date. That is just one example of how an old or outdated piece of content can be improved.
Content that gets no traffic. You can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to determine which pieces of content are not helping you reach your business goals.
"If you see that you are getting a lot of impressions but not so many clicks, you may want to change something in the content," Splitt said. "If you get a lot of clicks thanks to the text but then see in your analytics that those visits do not turn into sales: is the traffic worth it, or do you need to change your content there?"
Using these tools to track page views, bounce rate and other parameters will show which articles need combining or removing entirely.
How do you consolidate your content?
Delete content that holds no value. "If it is thin content, there is a risk of simply spending crawl budget on pages that in the end do not work or are no longer even indexed," Splitt said during SEO Mythbusting, adding: "You usually have to look carefully at whether an article really is performing badly. If it is, it has to be removed or changed."
As mentioned above, Google Search Console and Analytics can be used to find content that brings no value to your audience.
Articles similar in meaning and purpose are better combined. Users usually have several related queries, or intents, so it is logical to connect the articles that answer them.
If someone has just started thinking about buying a new car, for instance, they will probably want to learn about its fuel economy, its safety ratings, its features and other similar models.
Instead of creating a multitude of articles devoted to each of those specific questions, that information can be combined and structured. That reduces the amount of content you have competing with your other articles.
Then, once the articles are joined, set up 301 redirects, canonical tags or noindex tags on the pages that have become redundant, to redirect the traffic and the weight of those pages.
Update existing pages instead of creating new ones. In some industries the situation changes every year — in the car industry or smartphone manufacturing, where new models come out annually — which means new content is needed even if you have published material on the same subject.
In other industries there is the option of updating existing content instead of creating something from scratch. An article with instructions on preparing a sprinkler system for winter, for instance, is unlikely to hold different information from year to year.
Conclusions
Content consolidation is an important part of any modern SEO strategy. There is no universal sequence of steps here. The main principle to adopt is this: combine in order to increase the value of the content.
Proper content consolidation increases a site's traffic seriously — and it can be done at minimal financial cost.
Read the Host4Biz blog: we will share the most useful things from the world of online marketing and provide reliable hosting for your sites.