How To Make Your Content Topically Relevant

Understanding topical relevance is one thing. Actually implementing it on your site – especially one that’s accumulated years of content – is quite another!

Most websites have 30% to 50% of pages that hurt more than help their overall performance. These pages dilute topical focus, waste crawl budget, and confuse Google about what the site actually specialises in.

Identifying which pages are the problem requires systematic analysis, not guesswork.

Categorise problem content with the death sentence trio

Not all problematic content is problematic in the same way. Understanding the difference helps determine whether to delete, optimise, or consolidate.

We call these three categories the “death sentence trio” – but not all death sentences are equal.

🥀 Decaying content (once good, now fading)

Decaying content previously ranked or drove traffic but is now experiencing declining performance. The content may be outdated, superseded by newer information, or simply losing ground to competitors. However, it’s still topically relevant to your site.

Characteristics:

• Previously achieved rankings in positions 1-20
• Historical traffic that’s declined 50% or more
• Topic aligns with your current strategy
• Content quality was good but information is now dated
• Page still receives some backlinks or internal links

💀 Dead content (never had a pulse)

Dead content never achieved meaningful rankings, attracted minimal to zero organic traffic and shows little to no engagement metrics. These pages may be technically fine, but are strategically pointless – they never resonated with users or search engines.

Characteristics:

• Never ranked in top 50 for target keywords
• Fewer than 10 organic visits per month for over a year
• High bounce rate or low engagement when traffic does occur
• Few or no internal links from other pages
• No or minimal external backlinks

🚮 Irrelevant content (off-topic clutter)

Irrelevant content doesn’t support your core topical pillars. It was created for an old strategy, random keyword opportunities or simply because it seemed interesting at the time. This content dilutes your topical authority and confuses users and Google about your site’s purpose.

Characteristics:

• Topic doesn’t connect to your core expertise
• Created when your strategy was different
• No logical relationship to your other content
• Might drive some traffic but not your target audience
• Makes your site seem unfocused or generalist

How to run a topical relevance audit

Now that you understand the framework, let’s get practical. Here’s exactly how to assess your site’s content and identify what needs action.

Step 1: Export your data from Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is ideal for this audit because it crawls your site and exports data you can analyse. You can export up to 500 URLs for free, which is sufficient for many sites.

How to do it:

1. Enter your domain into Screaming Frog
2. Set up filters to focus on blog content only (typically pages under /blog/ or similar URL structure)
3. Let the crawl complete
4. Export the data, including URL, title, word count, status codes and indexability
5. Save as a CSV file

Step 2: Gather Google Analytics data

Traffic data provides crucial context about which pages are actually performing. You need to know which pages drive traffic, engagement and conversions.

How to do it:

1. Go to Google Analytics 4
2. Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens
3. Add a filter for your blog subdirectory (e.g., page path contains “/blog/”)
4. Set your date range to at least 12 months to capture seasonal variations
5. Export the data, including page path, views, users, average engagement time and conversions
6. Save as a CSV file

Step 3: Optional tidy up

This step isn’t essential, but it makes AI analysis easier and more accurate.

You can either keep the CSVs as individual downloads or combine them into a Google Sheet with separate tabs for Screaming Frog data and Analytics data.

If you combine them, delete any columns that aren’t relevant to the audit (like user IDs, session IDs or other technical data that doesn’t inform content decisions).

Step 4: Get AI to do the heavy lifting

Now comes the clever part. Rather than manually reviewing hundreds of pages, you’ll use AI to analyse your data and categorise each page.

How to do it:

1. Upload your CSV files (or share your Google Sheet) to Claude or ChatGPT
2. Use the below content audit prompt
3. The AI will analyse each URL against your core topics and traffic data
4. It will categorise each page as Keep, Optimise, Consolidate or Delete
5. It will provide reasoning for each recommendation
6. It will export the results as a CSV you can import into a Google Sheet

The AI looks for patterns like:

• Pages with declining traffic (decaying)
• Pages with no traffic despite being indexed for months (dead)
• Pages on topics unrelated to your core focus (irrelevant)
• Pages that could be combined for greater impact (consolidation opportunities)

Step 5: Review and verify the AI recommendations

AI is powerful, but not infallible. Always manually review the recommendations before taking action, especially for pages the AI suggests deleting.

What to check:

• Does the AI understand your business correctly?
• Are there pages flagged for deletion that actually have strategic importance?
• Are there consolidation suggestions that make sense?
• Does the categorisation align with your understanding of your content?

Step 6: Make decisions and take action

Now comes the hard part – actually implementing the recommendations. This requires courage because you’ll be deleting content you or your team worked hard to create.

For pages marked “Delete”

1. Review one final time to ensure you agree
2. Note any internal links pointing to these pages (LinkWhisper plugin helps with this)
3. Set up 301 redirects to the most relevant alternative page on your site
4. Delete the pages
5. Update internal links to point to the redirect destination instead
6. Monitor 404 errors in Search Console to catch any missed links

For pages marked “Optimise”

1. Prioritise by potential impact (pages ranking positions 11-20 have the highest opportunity)
2. Research current top-ranking competitors
3. Identify gaps in your content compared to theirs
4. Update with current information, expand sections, improve depth
5. Refresh the publication date
6. Promote the updated content to attract new links

For pages marked “Consolidate”

1. Identify which page should be the primary one (usually the one with best existing traffic/links)
2. Merge content from secondary pages into the primary page
3. Improve the primary page with the best elements from each
4. Set up 301 redirects from secondary pages to the primary page
5. Update internal links to point to the consolidated page

For pages marked “Keep”

1. Ensure they’re well-linked within your site structure
2. Look for opportunities to interlink with related content
3. Consider these your topical pillars – maintain and promote them

Step 7: Monitor the impact

After implementing changes, track the results. You should see improvements within 4-8 weeks, though the full impact may take several months.

What to monitor:

• Overall organic traffic trends
• Rankings for your core topic keywords
• Crawl efficiency in Search Console (are important pages getting crawled more frequently?)
• User engagement metrics (session duration, bounce rate)
• Conversion rates from organic traffic

Bulldog’s own journey to topical focus

Let’s examine what happened when we applied this exact process to our own site at Bulldog Digital Media.

The before

A few years ago, our blog wasn’t particularly topical. We published content on pretty much anything you could think of in the marketing realm.

We were a marketing agency offering multiple services, and our blog reflected that breadth. On the surface, this seemed logical – we helped clients with these services, so why not create content about them?

The problem was that we weren’t building authority in any specific area. Google saw us as a generalist marketing blog, not an expert in any particular discipline. Users didn’t know what we specialised in. Our content competed with thousands of other agencies writing similar generic marketing content.

The shift

We made a strategic decision to reposition our services around SEO and AI visibility through link building, digital PR and content creation. This meant our content needed to reflect that focused expertise.

We performed a comprehensive content audit and identified 133 pages to delete in 2024, followed by another 57 towards the end of 2025 as we narrowed our focus further.

These weren’t just low-traffic pages – some were driving traffic, but for topics that no longer aligned with our positioning.

We removed:

• Old agency news that had no SEO value
• Email marketing and PPC guides (we no longer offer these services)
• Amazon seller content (completely outside our new focus)
• Social media strategy posts (tangential at best)
• Generic marketing content that didn’t showcase SEO expertise

The results

The data proved our decision was right.

⭐️ Within two months, organic traffic increased 9.3%.
⭐️ Over the full year, organic traffic increased 14.4%.
⭐️ 4% more keywords ranking in the top 10
⭐️ 22.5% more keywords ranking in the top 3
⭐️ 18.1% more keywords ranking in position 1

We weren’t just ranking better; we were ranking better for terms that actually mattered to our business.

What did we learn?

Several insights emerged from our experience:

• Deleting content isn’t scary once you see results
• Traffic quality matters more than quantity
• Google rewards clarity
• Topical focus accelerates new content performance
• Internal linking becomes more powerful.

What other brands have benefited from culling pages?

Our results aren’t unique. Major sites have achieved even more dramatic improvements through content pruning focused on topical relevance.

Trainline: 130 million pages deleted

Trainline, the UK’s leading train ticket platform, deleted a staggering 130 million pages as part of a major site cleanup. These were mostly thin, low-quality pages that provided little user value.

The results

• Steady increase in organic traffic since deletion
• 30% increase in valuable pages crawled by GoogleBot
• Improved crawl efficiency meant important pages updated faster in search results

Trainline’s scale is extreme, but the principle is the same: removing low-quality content improves Google’s perception of your entire site.

Intuit QuickBooks: 2,000+ outdated posts removed

QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software, removed over 2,000 outdated blog posts that no longer aligned with their product or provided current information.

The results

• Organic traffic increased 20% within three weeks
• 72% increase in signups from organic visitors
• Improved Net Promoter Score as users found more relevant content

The signup increase is particularly telling – QuickBooks wasn’t just getting more traffic, they were getting better traffic that converted at higher rates.

IBM: Deleted 80% of marketing site

IBM took perhaps the boldest approach, deleting approximately 80% of its marketing site content in a massive cleanup project.

The results

• Net Promoter Score improved by 30% immediately
• Content quality scores improved
• Traffic and conversion metrics both increased
• Significantly reduced maintenance burden for content team

The pattern is clear

Whether it’s a 190-page deletion like ours, 2,000 pages like QuickBooks or 130 million pages like Trainline, the results consistently show that pruning unfocused content improves site performance.

When you focus on topical authority, less truly means more:

• More valuable content that serves users better
• More relevant rankings for terms that matter to your business
• More targeted traffic that converts at higher rates

The hard part isn’t the technical execution of deleting pages – it’s having the discipline to admit that past content decisions were wrong and the courage to act on that realisation.