Inherited a B2B site with 40 service pages of 250-400 words each, all written from the same template, most getting under 20 sessions a month. I have five hours a week and no writer budget. Option A is rewriting them one at a time and finishing next spring, option B is folding them into 8 strong pages with 301s and being done in six weeks. What would you weigh other than time?
Weigh whether the 40 map to genuinely different searches or to 8 searches expressed 40 ways. Export every query each page ranks for, dedupe, and see how many distinct intents you actually have. In every version of this I've done, the answer came out around 10-12 real intents and the rest were the same thing with a city name or a synonym swapped. Consolidate to match the intents, not to match your calendar.
Then the location variants are a separate decision from the rest. If you have real local presence, keep them and make them genuinely local. If not, one page.
Ran that. 40 pages, 14 clusters, and four of those clusters are just location variants of the same service.
One thing that isn't time: sales. Ask whoever sells whether they send prospects a link to any of those 40 pages. I've consolidated away a page with 11 sessions a month that turned out to be the page the sales team pasted into every proposal. Traffic isn't the only reason a URL exists.
This has bitten me twice. Now I always check the CRM for URLs in email templates before killing anything.
If you go with 8, redirect each old URL to the specific section anchor on the new page rather than dumping all 40 at the same top-level URL. Takes an extra hour and keeps the mapping meaningful if you ever need to unpick it.
Do one cluster end to end first and measure it for six weeks before committing to the other seven. Cheap insurance and it gives you something concrete to show your boss.
@index_and_chill · 5mo ago
Consolidation is also much easier to undo than people fear if you keep the old content in a file and the redirect map in a spreadsheet. Rewriting 40 pages at five hours a week means the first ones you rewrite will be nine months stale by the time you finish the last one.
Reply
Report