Does your content match what appears on Page 1 of Google? Consolidating pages could boost your SEO performance if not. How?
Over the past year, the topic of Google’s quality threshold and how it pertains to indexing has gained increasing recognition and popularity.
A page’s and domain’s value proposition is influenced by a number of factors. The term “useful purpose” is a crucial one that Google addresses in its Quality Rater Guidelines.
Website performance (and rankings) reductions are more frequently caused by:
- The site has spread value around a specific topic across too many URLs with the aim of ranking multiple URLs for multiple keywords.
- The SERPs have changed (and now present users with different value propositions).
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 currently selecting 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 papers that are contained within a single domain by applying the logic of value proposition and beneficial purpose to this.
How does content consolidation work?
The process of combining various pieces of content, such as blog posts, articles, or landing pages created for SEO, into a single, coherent article is known as content consolidation.
This single, well-rounded item features a solid value proposition (and core content), as well as supplementary components that connect to related content (supporting content).
Naturally, you will also be deleting (or updating) outdated and inaccurate content during this process.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.
Consolidation audits, in my opinion, ought to be content-focused rather than page-type-specific.
Moving components from blog entries onto commercial pages, for instance, is okay if it improves the commercial page’s value proposition and helps it rank for more pertinent search terms.
The meaning of “quality”
A bullet list is one of the most important aspects of establishing page quality.
However, the first item on this list is the one that most directly connects to the page’s beneficial function; this is 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 “useful purpose” has taken on greater significance as Google has been enhancing and updating SERPs in recent months, with some updates appearing to change or blend contrasting intentions (to produce results that encompass more popular interpretations than before).
Then, when discussing a page’s high quality and relevant, helpful purpose, we begin referring to pages as possessing these qualities:
- Appropriate amounts of important, supporting content
- High levels of E-A-T
- Main content created with high quality (defining the core intent)
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 is diminished when it is spread out over a large number of sites since Google ranks URLs.
The process of consolidation
Your efforts to consolidate data can be informed by several data sources.
These consist of:
- Rank tracking tool of choice
- Common analytics tools for pageviews, entrances and exits
- Google Search Console
With this data, you will be able to identify potential problem areas and cleanse them to help you rank higher.