As a marketer, you understand the importance of regularly publishing new content to stay relevant and maintain a strong SEO strategy. However, it’s equally crucial not to overlook your old blog posts once they are published. Without proper maintenance, your blog can quickly become bloated and lose its relevance, negatively impacting your search engine rankings. In this ultimate guide, we will explore five steps to rejuvenate your old, forgotten-about content and boost your search ranking.
Why Are Blog Audits Important?
Before we dive into the steps, let’s understand why blog audits are crucial. Old, outdated content leads to fewer page visits, decreased average time spent on page, and declining performance, all of which can harm your search engine ranking. Additionally, as search engines like Google roll out new algorithm updates and ranking signals, your old content may not be optimized to meet these new requirements. Conducting an annual blog audit allows you to review your content, extract value from your old posts, and send the right signals to Google. It also helps you stay topically focused and turns your old content into an asset rather than a liability.
Step 1: Analyze Your Content
To begin the process of rejuvenating your old blog content, you need to analyze your existing posts. Collect data on every post you’ve published, including the title, URL, topic/category, keywords, publishing date, word count, author, and monthly visits. This data will provide you with insights into the performance of each post. For a more comprehensive audit, consider analyzing engagement data such as time on page and bounce rates, as well as usability insights like Core Web Vitals. By gathering this information, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content and make informed decisions about how to proceed.
Step 2: Review SEO Keywords
One common mistake in blog content is having multiple pages competing for the same keyword. This splits your search ranking potential across each page and dilutes the SEO benefits. To optimize your content, ensure you have one high-quality page targeting each of your priority keywords. Conduct a thorough review of your blog posts to identify any pages targeting the same keyword. Instead of having multiple pages competing, create evergreen pages for your priority keywords and build content clusters around related keywords and sub-topics. This approach maximizes your coverage and improves your rankings.
Step 3: Keep, Combine, Kill
Now that you have analyzed your content and reviewed your SEO keywords, it’s time to clean up your blog. Group your posts into three categories: keep, combine, and kill.
Keep: Identify the content that continues to add value to your users and aligns with your SEO strategy. Optimize these posts by establishing expertise, authority, and trust, which are key signals that Google looks for. Consider improving the content structure, updating statistics and sources, and adding videos or new sections to enhance the page’s performance.
Combine: If you have multiple posts covering the same keyword or topic, it’s best to consolidate them. Combining related posts into a single, high-performing page improves your rankings and generates more traffic. It also reduces keyword cannibalization, ensuring that your content isn’t competing with itself for search visibility.
Kill: Identify low-quality content that is not adding value to your audience or your SEO strategy. This includes poorly written, off-topic, syndicated, or potentially stolen/plagiarized content. Additionally, remove any content with poor performance metrics such as low organic page views, impressions, links, shares, conversions, or engagements, or a high bounce rate. Removing these pages is essential to prevent them from harming your overall search ranking.
Step 4: Refresh Old Content
With your blog posts categorized, it’s time to refresh and update your old content. Start by ensuring that all your posts are up to date with the latest information. Add recent statistics and insights, providing links to authoritative sources to back up your content’s key message. Incorporate high-quality images with optimized alt-text and consider embedding relevant video clips where suitable.
Next, revise the structure of your posts to optimize them for both readers and search engines. Ensure a consistent structure across all your posts, including optimized titles, headings, and keywords. By refreshing and improving the quality of your content, you increase its relevance and appeal to both users and search engines.
Step 5: Optimize for the Latest SEO Updates
The SEO industry is constantly evolving, with search engines like Google introducing new algorithm updates and ranking signals. It’s essential to optimize your content to align with these updates and changes in guidelines. Currently, optimizing for experience, expertise, authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) is a priority. Demonstrate your expertise and authority in the subjects you cover to build trust with your audience and search engines.
As you merge and update your old content, ensure that you meet the latest Google quality rater guidelines. Stay informed about algorithm updates, page experience updates, Core Web Vitals, and other relevant changes to optimize your content effectively.
Conclusion
Reviving old blog content is an effective strategy to improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your website. By following these five steps, you can analyze, review, refresh, and optimize your content, ensuring that it remains valuable and relevant to both users and search engines. Don’t let your old blog posts harm your SEO strategy – give them a new lease of life and reap the rewards of increased visibility and engagement. Start your blog audit today and unlock the full potential of your content.