Should we de-index pages that not receiving any traffic?

[vadimmarusin10]

We had a 10 pages website that was doing great with very competitive keywords, ( Vancouver Landscaping, Surrey Landscaping, etc)  than we added 90 more pages to the website in order to target long tail keywords. Our traffic grew a little bit, but we lost all high competitive keywords, instead we got more traffic for our long tails like ( Yard clean up Burnaby). Is it a common rule in SEO?

If yes, should we de index or even delete "long tail" pages that not receiving any traffic? Would it give us bigger chance to get our high competitive keywords back?

We are looking for a SEO strategist that can help us, so suggestions and audits would be greatly appreciated and could lead to business with us.

website- www(dot)beaverlandscape(dot)com

Thank you!

[danatanseo]

Hi Vadim,

My initial response/question would be: If you are willing to consider de-indexing those pages, why not just remove them from the site completely?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding. Maybe this is what you are thinking of doing anyway? It is not uncommon on larger sites for a very small number of pages to be driving almost all of the traffic. Still, there may be people linking to some of those pages and that may be helping you, even if you aren't getting traffic from them. It sounds like it could be a possibility that you are cannibalizing keywords but not sure until taking a deeper dive. If you added pages targeting substantially similar keywords it could be that Google is having difficulty determining which page is more important for a given term. Consequently, neither page does as well as it could if there were only one.

Generally speaking, more pages on a site is a good thing, but only when the content is really unique and fulfills a need or want from your audience.

What did you do to promote this new content? Sometimes it takes some serious effort and coordination to get a piece of content noticed. The days of "If we build it they will come" are long gone. Maybe you just need to promote those new pages?

Just some thoughts. Cheers,

Dana