If your business has been making content for some time, you’ll reach a point where some of your newer content overlaps with old content. Or you may have various related, but repetitive pieces you’ve published. There are people who have been sold on the idea that more content is better, so the prospective issue here may not be obvious.

If left unchecked, this may result in a situation in which you have multiple pages of content competing for the same search intent. Google’s algorithms aim to show no more than 2 results from the same domain for a given query. This means that while you are competing against other businesses in the search results, you might also be competing against yourself and not showcasing your best content or preferred result.

Why Content Consolidation Should be Part of SEO Activity

Consolidating content can help you get your way and boost the chances of getting the desired page to rank well in search results. It can boost your link building efforts, as other sites will have one version of your content to point back to.

It makes it easier for a user to locate the information they’re searching for and helps you remove under performing content that may be doing more harm than good.

Opportunities to Consolidate Content

There are several types of content that may not have value:

• Pages with Less Content

Google may perceive pages that are light on content as low value.

• Copied content

Google doesn’t penalize sites over copied content. However, for larger sites, having lots of URLs that host the same content may dilute the crawl budget and reduce signals, slowing down a search engine’s ability to index and evaluate your pages. Even if your site is small, identifying copied content can boost your user-experience.

• Outdated Content

A user stumbling onto your obsolete guest post is likely to bounce from your website as soon as they realize it is out of date, taking their business along with them. Eliminating the outdated content from your website may be a better alternative than leaving it up, or you can update the article with current changes.

• Content that doesn’t get any reach

You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to know which content pieces are failing to help you reach your business objectives. If you are seeing that you get a lot of impressions, but no clicks, you might want to change something about the content.

How to Consolidate Your Content

1. Eliminate Content That Doesn’t Give Value

If it’s very thin content, then you might spend crawl budget on pages that are not performing or not even being indexed anymore. Some SEO tools can be used to know which pieces of content may take up crawl resources or may be cannibalizing your keywords without any value to your audience.

2. Combine Content That Serves the Same Aim

Users may have more than one question, and those questions are associated to whatever stage they’re at in the buyer’s journey. Instead of having different articles addressing each detail about the brand, service, or products, publishers could consolidate this information that is all pertinent to the same stage that the user is at. This can eliminate the content quantity that you have competing over the same keyword sets, and it will enhance your user experience by centralizing all the details that a client may need onto one page.

3. Refresh Existing Pages

There may be an opportunity to update existing content, rather than making something from scratch that overlaps with what you’ve already published.