How to Increase Organic Traffic with a Content Audit

Recently, I did a content audit on my website and had an 80%+ increase in organic traffic. This tutorial shows how to get more traffic from Google by deleting and redirecting content on your website. Conventional SEO wisdom will tell you to publish more content to get more traffic. But that’s not always the case. There’s an SEO strategy that has gained popularity called a content audit. In its simplest form, it’s a way to get rid of underperforming, low-quality pages with the goal to improve the overall “health” of a website. This is generally done by deleting pages (404) or redirecting/consolidating it with other relevant pieces (301). But is deleting content a good idea? John Mueller from Google has said, "From my point of view, if you're aware of low-quality pages on your website, then that's something I'd try to fix and find a solution to, be that either removing those pages if you really can't change them or, in the best case, finding a way to make them less low-quality and actually making them useful, good pages on your site" Here’s a quick background on the website being audited in this tutorial. A few years ago, Sam purchased a blog with around 1,000 pages in the sitemap. The topics were so widespread that if he deleted all pages outside of his chosen niche, he would have been left with around 12 pages. So the goal of the first round of deleting pages was simple. ► Delete pages that don’t get a “meaningful” level of traffic. ► Redirect or consolidate pages that don’t get a “meaningful” level of traffic but have external backlinks. ► Manually review pages that are not getting a “meaningful” level of organic traffic and make some hard decisions. This tutorial walks you through various scenarios that you’ll run into should you choose to perform a content audit on your website. Now, this process can be extremely time consuming and the last thing you want to…