Most companies aren’t aware that they can use the reduce, reuse, and recycle model that’s common in waste management in their SEO efforts. However, plenty of businesses can benefit from revising their website content on a regular basis, removing any content that decreases the company’s website rank in search engine results pages, and updating old content with new information.
Reducing
Companies often have to reduce the amount of content on their website. That means removing any pages that aren’t generating organic traffic the way they were meant to be, such as landing pages and blog posts. Companies have two options when it comes to reducing those pages.
One is the no Index option so that crawlers from search engines can’t detect those pages. The other option is completely removing pages from the company’s website. Businesses should also remove any duplicate content from their websites, as duplicate content is considered plagiarism by search engines, which can be punished by lowering a website’s ranking.
Reusing
Companies can reuse any pieces of content that have performed decently in the past, and figure out how they can be optimized to perform even better. Any pages that have received a steady amount of traffic in the past, but whose performance has slowly dropped over time, can be improved. Those pages tend to have a lot of great content in them that can be reused to improve the overall website performance, simply by re-optimizing it and using the same URL.
Any pages that have high impression rates in search engine results pages, but that don’t receive a lot of website traffic, should get updated titles, descriptions, metatags, and URLs. Website pages that have high bounce rates should be optimized for headings and overall structure, and more content can be added to them to turn them into detailed articles with more subheadings.
Recycling
Any pages that aren’t performing well can be recycled. By including related keywords in them, the content from those pages can be used on pages with better performance. Companies can also merge two pages that have the same keywords, by including the content from the less popular page into the page with better performance.
They can also re-purpose the content for a guest blog post on another website, or use the same article for other types of content, such as an article about gift ideas being re-purposed for an article about holiday gifts.
This waste management strategy shouldn’t be performed once and forgotten in the future. It should actually be a frequent practice in a company’s content lifecycle. By checking their website performance at regular intervals, companies can use the reduce, reuse, recycle method to plan content and improve their SEO efforts.