How to Audit Your Blog & Get Rewarded for Doing So

Have you ever taken a journey through your company blog, only to find yourself lost in a sea filled with content – some old, some new, some great, some…not so much? If so, it’s time to dive deep and do some work at cleaning up your content.

We know, we know. You worked hard to create all of that content. You’re attached. But saying goodbye to it is important. Consider these points:

Navigation: By reducing content, your blog will be easier to navigate. Your reader will be able to locate material faster and just simply move through the blog more comfortably.

Quality over Quantity: Sure, you may have some good content on your site, but when you focus on the best of the best, you’ll be rewarded for it. First, consider your reader. What posts are really going to keep them engaged and which ones will have them turning away (think: bounce rates) from your site? Keep an eye on your analytics; which articles are really grabbing your readers? Keep an ongoing spreadsheet of all of your top performing posts. This will help you to narrow in on what to keep and what to focus on in the future.

Remember that Google ranks your blog upon the quality of your posts’ performance. The more quality posts you have, the better you will rank. The more fluff you include, the harder it will be for Google to recognize you in the crowd.

Now that you’re ready to remove some content from your site, here’s what you can consider getting rid of or modifying:

Content that is old and no longer relevant or appears dated: Examples for Go Media’s blog included past contests, links to giveaways that are no longer active, and information about old job postings

Content that is poor quality or that doesn’t meet your brand standards: Examples include articles written by guest bloggers that do not seem to fit in or those that just do not reflect our brand persona any longer.

Content that doesn’t visually fall in line with your newest requirements: Examples include posts that have hero images of the wrong size/resolution or different header structuring. These posts can simply be modified as you have time.

Content that contains any dead links: Examples for us include links to freebies on our site that are no longer available or giveaways that are no longer offered. If these links can be repaired, do so!

Other things to keep in mind while you work:

Start with a spreadsheet: Do a content dump and start organizing what you have in a spreadsheet. Take a look at what is performing well and recognize what posts you can wave goodbye to. Tag with blog posts have been given the “green light” by your SEO by Yoast plugin and which posts you still have to dive into.

Put redirects into place as necessary. Before simply going crazy and deleting all of your posts, salvage the good stuff and when needed, make sure redirects are put into place.

Consolidate! Have a few small, quality posts that can be combined? Put them together in order to make them one longer, higher quality post.

Bump up your best material. Have some older posts that are still your top performers? As you’re going through, deleting posts, feel free to move this material up by simply changing the publish date.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Some of your posts will need to be updated, rewritten or modified, and hero images will need to be rebuilt. This won’t happen overnight. Keep a list of what you need to work on and rebuild piece by piece. Good luck!