In this podcast episode, Rebecca reviews the importance of reviewing your existing content, cleaning up your website, and pruning old blog posts. She walks through some recent work she’s done, what was performed, and what failed.
What Creates Bad Content?
- The age of the website
- The number of posts published
- The number of people adding and editing content
- The SEO knowledge of those editors and writers
Why You Should Perform an Audit
- Over time your subject matter evolves and older content just becomes outdated
- SEO changes and this brings forth new content issues like thin or duplicate content
- Things just break overtime: images, internal links, external links, styling, etc.
- Your business and/or brand evolves and older content may not fit within the existing image or messaging
- At some point, you’ve probably let someone who knows zero SEO add and edit content
- Keyword cannibalization can happen to the best of us and this kills your SEO efforts
- You learn more and you do better, so your content should reflect this advancement
Examples of Pruning and Cleaning
#1: Mid-market Website With 900 Posts
- Cleaned up blog categories and tags that were riddled with keyword cannibalization
- Removed over 50% of existing blog posts that included thin, duplicate, or outdated content
- Updated Semantic HTML5 subheader usage to better align with a real content outline
- Added author images and bios to ghost posts to increase authority for search engines and humans
- Fixed broken images, internal links, and external links
- Removed confusing internal links
- Removed “focused keywords” in Yoast that were totally wrong and misleading
- Created a ton of 301 redirects to prevent 404 errors, reroute traffic, preserve backlinks, and transfer any SEO ranking
- Noindexed thank you pages and other content that shouldn’t be used by search engines
#2: Enterprise Blog With 1,000s of Posts
- Removed existing blog posts that included thin content
- Removed large blocks of duplicate content within posts
- Removed outdated content within posts
- Added post intros to better align with subject matter and appeal to featured snippet usage
- Updated Semantic HTML5 subheader usage to better align with a real content outline
- Removed and edited a ton of keyword spam within image alt text
- Fixed broken images, internal links, and external links
- Added Semantic content to help search engines better understand post intent
- Rewrote entire posts to be more up to date and accurate
- Modified publish date for fully updated posts
- Removed confusing internal links and updated inaccurate anchor text
- Removed links to competitor website and offers (yes I really had to do this)
- Removed excessive links and images to make content more inline with usability best practices
- Removed “focused keywords” in Yoast that were totally wrong, misleading, or very broad
- Reduced URL length to an amount digestible by humans and search engines
- Reassigned the focused keyword to something more inline with the blog post content and search intent
- Created a ton of 301 redirects to prevent 404 errors, reroute traffic, preserve backlinks, and transfer any SEO ranking
Before You Start Pruning
- Review your top landing pages in Google Analytics
- Review your ranking keyword phrases and top ranked content in SEMrush
- Review your top backlinks and URLs in Ahrefs
- Think through your existing keyword strategy and have a keyword to URL map available
- Think through your internal linking strategy and map of keyword, anchor text, and URL map available
Today’s Episode Sponsor
Ahrefs is Rebecca’s go-to SEO tool for all things backlinks. She uses it for reviewing client backlinks, as well as deep diving into their competitor’s activity to discover new linking opportunities.
As mentioned in the show, Ahrefs is offering an exclusive giveaway to podcast listeners.
Every 4 shows, one listener will win a Lite Annual account to boost their own SEO performance! Send a tweet @ahrefs and @rebeccagill to tell us why you’d like to win this giveaway.