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The important three words here, however, are ‘clear’, ‘concise’, and ‘engaging’. It doesn’t matter how strong your content campaign is, these are main factors that are very hard to get right. Even with a strong strategy, your blog topics can easily begin to blend, become thin, outdated, duplicated, or simply fail to get the attention you need.

Thankfully for you, there is a way to get around this. It’s known as content consolidation.

What is Content Consolidation?

Here at XIST2, we offer both web design and SEO services in Oxford that are designed to optimise UX and ensure strong SEO rankings, but without consolidating your content, you might find that your website becomes too optimised.

For instance, if you have a lot of blog posts, you might notice that you’re beginning to cannibalise your own content. Posts with appropriate keywords and content that meets the intent of users are considered highly authoritative, but if you’re beginning to double-up on content, then you’re deferring Google from high-quality, authoritative content to content that is only moderately authoritative.

Content consolidation, however, is the process of analysing your content across your site and consolidating it to increase value. By doing this, you’re turning competing articles into one, ever-green article that will be noticed by Google and compete well against other sites. Essentially, you have fewer pages with better content, which not only meets the quality standards of Google, but incites a strong, accessible UX that will be beneficial for your CTR.

The Pros of Content Consolidation

With all of this being said, consolidating website content is not always plain sailing. It requires a concise content plan and the know-how to achieve optimal results. With this in mind, we’re going to take a quick look at the pros and cons of consolidation, and what you can do to ensure its success. Starting with the positives.

  • Merge Duplicate Content

According to a recent study, around 30% of the internet consists of duplicate content. By consolidating your content, you can organise the information on your site and make it one, coherent whole.

  • Ensure Quality

This then helps you to ensure the quality of your content is maintained. As mentioned before, Google pays attention to the quality and authority of your content. If you have multiple blog posts on one single topic, then the overall quality of your content is going to be decreased.

  • Remove Outdated Content

Consolidating your content also gives you the opportunity to remove outdated content that is hindering your SEO results. Either this or you can make appropriate edits and revisions to ensure accuracy and keep your content as relevant as possible.

  • Revisit Your Audience

Because you’re going to be revising your content, you will similarly be revising your audience to understand what keywords will match their buyer behaviour. Even outside of consolidation, this is a beneficial process that will help you to outrank your competitors.

  • Tighten the UX

Thinking outside of SEO for a moment, consolidating your content is a great way to improve the user experience of your website, ensuring that the journey of your users is as smooth as possible. With an easily navigable and accessible website, your users will find the content they want sooner and engage quicker, which will ultimately increase CTR.

The Cons of Content Consolidation

To finish off, we need to mention the pitfalls that you need to avoid. Most of these will only occur without a concise plan, so make sure you have done your research and have put the effort in before you begin to consolidate.

  • Decreased Visibility

A key issue that can occur with consolidation is decreased visibility. By removing web pages from your site, you could be removing key data that has placed you further up the Google rankings.

  • Loss of Successful Keywords

With this in mind, deleting or merging content can also lose your most successful keywords. Once again, this is why organising and analysing the relevant data is essential before you begin. You need to understand the risks of consolidation and what could lose your website’s traffic.

  • Deleting Potentially Relevant Topics

We mentioned before that consolidating helps you delete all of your outdated content, but content that is irrelevant now might not be irrelevant in the future. Deleting content with certain keywords might seem like a positive initially, but can harm you if those keywords become popular again.

  • Time Management

Another con to content consolidation is that – you might have realised – it takes a lot of research and data configuration. To ensure you are going through the process with a low risk of failure, you need to spend a lot of time working out your strategy.

  • SEO Development

We should also note that SEO is an ever-evolving landscape, and nothing stays the same for very long. By consolidating your content now, you’re doing so with 2024’s SEO trends in mind, but these trends can change over the next few years.

Even with these cons in mind, however, we think content consolidation can ultimately be a huge positive for your website. It just needs to be done with care!