I was recently working on a HubSpot project for a client. As I was building their hub/spoke search engine optimization (SEO) topics, I noticed they had quite a bit of outdated and irrelevant content.
I sent an email to the client explaining the situation and letting him know that I would not be using that content in their SEO efforts. He was a little shocked because he’d had an SEO audit done the previous year (by another company) for the site rebuild. That company they did not flag the content, only pages with zero page views.
Identify Under-performing Web Pages Using GA4 Reports with step-by-step video instructions.
According to Experts
Whether it’s blogs, video, landing pages, images, or other site content, all of it matters when it comes to SEO and ranking factors.
Semrush highlights that “content pruning can improve your rankings (positions) in search engines by helping you identify and update or remove any outdated or inaccurate information on your site.”
Ahrefs notes that “removing low-quality pages might help the remaining content rank better,” as Google’s systems consider the overall quality of a website when determining rankings.
As Google explains, “Having relatively high amounts of unhelpful content might cause other content on the site to perform less well in Search, to a varying degree. Removing unhelpful content might contribute to your other pages performing better.”
Why it matters—5 factors.
If your site has outdated or irrelevant content, it impacts several things in relation to SEO, including:
- Decreasing Your Site’s Authority: Search engines want to show users the most accurate, up-to-date info. If your content is outdated, it signals to Google that your site isn’t well-maintained, which can hurt your rankings across the board.
- Increasing Bounce Rates: Visitors landing on outdated or irrelevant pages are more likely to leave quickly. High bounce rates tell search engines the page wasn’t useful or engaging — a red flag for SEO.
- Diluting Keyword Focus: If you have a lot of irrelevant or outdated posts, you’re potentially competing against your own newer, better-optimized pages. This “keyword cannibalization” can confuse search engines about which page to rank.
- Wasting Crawl Budget: Google only allocates a certain amount of crawl time for your site. If bots are spending time crawling stale content, they may miss new, important pages you want indexed.
- Hurting User Experience: SEO isn’t just about rankings—it’s about providing value. If users can’t trust your content to be current and useful, they’re less likely to return or convert, and Google notices.
In Action
Ahrefs shared how Eugene Zatiychuk, SEO Lead at Belkins, started a content pruning exercise with his focus on removing low-quality content. The results were spectacular. He said, “After pruning 400 pages of low-quality content (almost two-thirds of the entire site), traffic began to climb steadily from 3,000 organic visits per month to almost 10,000.”
What can you do?
Here are three things you can do to keep your content updated and relevant.
- Audit Content Regularly – Identify pages with low traffic, outdated stats, or irrelevant topics.
- Update or Consolidate – Refresh useful content or combine related posts to strengthen performance.
- Remove or Redirect – If a page is beyond saving, 301 redirect it to a related page or remove it entirely.
Identifying Under-performing Pages
To identify under-performing pages in Google Analytics4 (GA4), navigate to the “Pages and screens” report, then analyze metrics like engagement rate, total users, sessions, and engaged sessions to pinpoint pages with low performance.
Here’s a detailed breakdown or view the ten-minute, step-by-step instructional video.
Access the “Pages and Screens” Report:
- Go to “Reports” in the GA4 dashboard.
- Navigate to “Life cycle” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens”.
Analyze Key Metrics:
- Engagement Rate: This metric indicates how often users are engaged on a specific page. A low engagement rate suggests users are not interacting with the content.
- Total Users: This metric shows the number of unique users who visited a page.
- Sessions: This metric shows the number of sessions that included a visit to a specific page.
- Engaged Sessions: This metric shows the number of sessions where users spent time on a page.
- Views per Session: This metric shows the number of times a page was viewed.
- Views per user: This metric shows the average number of views per user
Identify Under-performing Pages:
- Low Engagement Rate: Pages with significantly lower engagement rates compared to other pages are likely underperforming.
- Low Total Users/Sessions: Pages with fewer users or sessions may indicate a lack of traffic or poor visibility.
- High Bounce Rate (Calculated): While GA4 doesn’t directly track bounce rate, you can calculate it by dividing the number of sessions that aren’t engaged by the total number of sessions and multiplying by 100.
Your Next Move
Now that you’ve identified under-performers, choose your remedy—archive/delete, update, or redirect.
Need help? Contact me. I’ve been building websites and working with SEO for over 20 years.