Does your content match what appears on Page 1 of Google? Consolidating pages could boost your SEO performance if not. How? Read on.
Over the past year, the topic of Google’s quality threshold and how it pertains to indexing has gained increasing recognition and popularity.
Several factors influence a page’s and domain’s value proposition. However, “useful purpose” is a crucial idea that Google highlights in their Quality Rater Guidelines. (In Why 100% indexing isn’t achievable, and why that’s OK, I discuss how beneficial purpose relates to indexing.)
Website performance (and rankings) reductions are more frequently caused by:
- SERPs have altered (and now present users with different value propositions).
- To rate several URLs for various keywords, the site has dispersed value around a specific topic across an excessive number of URLs.
The value proposition of the target page was strengthened after we audited and combined these pages (or page elements), which also improved performance and made the pages more compatible with the content that Google is now choosing to display on Page 1.
Google has talked about collapsing content, but mainly in the context of collapsing domains or subdomains that compete for the same themes and terms or have overlapped them.
We can also do this for documents within a single domain by applying the logic of value proposition and beneficial purpose.
What is Content Consolidation?
Combining various pieces of content, such as blog posts, articles, or landing pages created for SEO, into a single, coherent writing is known as content consolidation.
This single, well-rounded item features a solid value proposition (and core content) and additional components that connect to related content (supporting content).
Naturally, you will also delete (or update) outdated and inaccurate content during this process.
This should fit in with your overall content strategy and either increase visibility at the top of the funnel or guide users to your conversion-focused pages by responding to use-case queries.
Definition of “Quality”
The most crucial elements in judging page quality are listed in a bulleted list in Section 3.1 of the Quality Rater Guidelines.
However, the first item on this list is the one that most directly connects to the page’s beneficial function, known as the “purpose of the page.”
Each page has a different function, such as disseminating knowledge or promoting a good or service. The next step is to assign that page type a page quality score.
The phrase “beneficial purpose” has taken on greater significance as Google has been enhancing and updating SERPs in recent months. Some updates appear to change or mix contrasting intents (to provide results that cover more common interpretations than before).
When we begin referring to a page as having a meaningful, worthwhile goal and excellent quality, we move into the territory of describing pages as having:
- High E-A-T levels.
- High-calibre and adequate primary content levels (defining the core beneficial purpose).
- High quantities of pertinent, assisting content
In contrast, a page may have a clear positive objective (such as to sell or promote a good or service), but it will still suffer if it lacks the other elements. A topic’s potential worth diminishes when it spreads over many sites since Google ranks URLs.
Quality writing also plays a large effort in ensuring your content is elaborated clearly to your site visitors. Outsourcing to
Combination Procedure
Your efforts to consolidate data can be informed by several data sources.
These consist of the following:
- Tools for pageviews, entrances, and exits in standard analytics.
- Search Console by Google.
- Your preferred tool for rank tracking.
You can use this information to pinpoint probable trouble spots.
Priority URL Targets Selection
Where we should start is always the first question I get from clients when we work on anything like this.
Google Search Console contains the finest response.
We wish to search for pages in coverage reports that have the following categories in the omitted section:
- Alternative page with the proper canonical tag Crawled but not yet indexed Duplicate without user-selected canonical Duplicate where Google chose a different canonical than user Soft 404
These exclusion criteria point to potential problems with page quality and suggest that the URLs might be correct but fall short of the standard for indexing.
Organising Pages
Before deleting the deconstructed page, it’s a good idea to take good content parts from a blog URL and put them into a commercial URL (if it makes sense to do so and improves the value proposition).
For several well-known websites, you might see that your help page and other blog posts are all vying for the same search terms.
This is an excellent chance to reposition these pages. As an illustration, you might have a blog post that targets top-of-funnel terms and a help article that targets particular problems.
In this case, you can de-optimize the article such that it doesn’t compete with the support article because it offers a stronger value proposition and more effectively addresses the support inquiries’ objectives.
Since every website is different and every content strategy is unique, there isn’t a predetermined approach or framework to follow in achieving this.
However, even if it reduces specific pageviews, your immediate attention should be on preserving and enhancing the performance of business indicators (such as leads and revenue).
Achieving this can be accomplished using tools such as DMA’s GMB Optimisation to assist you to constantly update your content. Updates will be completed weekly followed by a monthly report to ensure that there is constant monitoring in progress.
DMA Content Marketing Services understands the market’s needs and demands to generate better insights to push your tactics. Our team is ready to make use of social media or articles to boost the popularity of your products/services. Feel free to contact us to successfully see great SEO results.
