What is Irrelevant Content in SEO?
Irrelevant content in SEO is anything that does not add value to the website and the product/service being offered or does not match with the search query entered by the user.
Irrelevant content can also be "thin content" or "low-quality content".
How to identify Non-Relevant Content on Your Website?
There are several signs that you have to look out for when identifying irrelevant content.
First, use your brain (your own supercomputer).
Do you see any content on your website, that might not belong there?
Is the content you are writing something that your target audience might want to read?
Rewrite, no-index or remove and content that you think is irrelevant.
We have also compiled the main signs of irrelevant content for you.
Main Signs of Non-Relevant Content in SEO:
High Bounce Rate: People Visit, But Don't Stay
If people are not staying on your website even if they have come to it through organic search, your content is either irrelevant or incomplete.
A clear sign of this is having a high bounce rate on your article. This means that although people are landing on your page (you are receiving organic traffic) they are not reading it.
It can be because your content is missing information that your visitors are actually looking for or they don't find it really valuable.
But in most cases, your content is just not filling the search intent. This means, that maybe you wrote an informational article, where people were looking to buy or vice versa.
This can also be because of your bad website design or user experience issues.
Make sure you always keep track of your Bounce Rate using Google Analytics and fix any pages that have a high one.
Low Traffic: Topic Miss alignment
If the traffic on your website is low it can be because you are not writing relevant content.
For example, if you are running a website that is about the best places to visit in India and you write an article about Arduino code then obviously your audience will not be interested in that content.
This does not only confuse your users but the search engines as well. These use semantic algorithms to determine what your website is about.
If you confuse search engines with irrelevant content, your website is just simply not going to rank and the quality score of your content is also going to be very low.
Make sure you do market research and keyword research before creating content.
No Keyword Targeting
If you are not targeting any keywords, you are just shooting at random, you won't be driving traffic that is actually interested in your business.
In order to drive relevant traffic to your website, you need to decide what relevant keywords you would like to rank for.
We usually do keyword research first and only write content after. For the keyword research, we already have a very extensive KW Research guide on our blog, so feel free to read that.
Having a good content strategy and a keyword mapping created for your website can help you easily create valuable content that is actually keyword-targeted!
Lack of User Engagement
A lack of user engagement can also be a sign that your content is irrelevant. Irrelevant content in this sense means that people are not sharing, commenting or even clicking on links in the post.
This happens because people do not find the content interesting, relevant or even valuable.
If the user engagement is low on your page, the position of that article in the search results will be low as well.
Lack of Unique Ideas
If you write articles that are very similar to articles that can already be found in the internet, people will just skip it.
So, if your article is too similar to the one they have already read there is no reason for them to read yours or share it with their friends.
People are looking for new information and interesting ideas. If you don't provide that, there is no point of sharing your content online through any social media platforms.
Even worse, if you copy the same content from somewhere else, it is going to create duplicate content issues!
High Impression, But No Clicks
If you see high impressions for a page on Google Search Console, but no one is actually clicking on your article, it is very likely that your Meta Title and Description are not CTR optimized or it is not relevant to the search query.
To get more people clicking on your search results listing, you will have to optimize your Meta Tags for SEO.
Do You Want More Customers?
If you are looking to generate more customers, check out this guide and learn how.
You'll find 5 steps that will help fix the most important things on your website today!
What are the consequences of Irrelevant Content?
Irrelevant content can affect your website in a number of ways.
It affects the number of page views that your website gets, the bounce rate, time on site and even your user engagement.
It also makes the topical map of your website very confusing for search engines.
All of these are SEO Ranking signals, which Google looks at when ranking your website. If you are competing with another website for Position 1 and their bounce rate is lower, they might win, because Google wants to provide the best results for its users.
If you post irrelevant content on your website, it will lower its quality score.
Quality Score is something that is used for Google Ads and it basically determines how relevant your website is for certain keywords, but it is useful for SEO as well since it can determine that if you are showing relevant information for a keyword or not.
How Can You Fix These Content Issues?
To fix any content that doesn't belong on your website, you can do several things:
Remove the content
You can fully remove the content from your website and notify Google of its removal. There is a tool called "Google URL Removal Tool", which can help you take out that old content of the search results.
Rewrite or Update the Content
Given how bad the content is, you can either rewrite or update it.
If the content is completely unrelated to the main topic of your website, but it is a topic that you think you could provide valuable information for your users, you can rewrite it to make it more relevant.
If it is only outdated, you can just update the blog post.
No-Index
If the content is something that cannot be keyword-targeted or optimized, but you are sure your users will read it, like updates, news of your business, you can consider No-Indexing it.
What are Irrelevant Keywords?
Irrelevant Keywords are words or phrases that you add to your content that don't actually add value.
This action is called "Keyword Stuffing" and it is considered a black hat SEO practice because you are adding keywords just to try and rank for them.
This doesn't only not work anymore, but Google considers it spammy, so we don't recommend doing it.
Why Is Quality Content Important in SEO?
Quality content is important for SEO for many reasons.
The first and most important reason is that it helps your users and it actually provides value. Write for your audience first and optimize for search engine later.
It of course also helps with how well you rank in Google or other search engines.
Google is scoring content with it's Information Gain Score. A lot of content on the web is the same, there are a lot of copycats who just rewrite content. Google needs to find the articles that actually provide value not just repeat the same info.
