What to do with your Old Blog Posts?

A blog is dynamic as it keeps changing with the needs and preferences of the users. Gone are the days when blogs were primarily focused on quantity. These days, the focus is more on quality, because quality content is the backbone of good marketing. Additionally, user experience has taken a higher priority for website owners. Now, the ultimate goal of blogs is not only to attract more audiences but also to generate a higher number of conversion rates. Therefore, it is imperative that your content is creative, consistent, has a purpose, and includes SEO tactics.

All said and done, a blog may eventually die. Read on to know why it is sensible to invest funds and spend hours curating a blog.

Why Should You Care About Old Blog Posts?

Poorly maintained blog content will cost us revenue.

Helps Build Our Brand Image: The information on our website should be updated as this helps in building trust in you, your brand identity.

Liable to Your Customers: As your blog posts create a public statement by your business. We need to ensure our prospects are provided with the most relevant and updated information.

Old Content Not Driving Content is Bad for SEO: This reflects that the content quality is not optimal and search engines do not like poor quality content. Having bulk content is just consuming your server space. Besides, search engine will need to crawl deep and poor quality content is disliked by search engines.

Loss of Your Revenue: If these posts are not generating traffic, think of ways to generate revenue.

Managing Your Old Blog Articles

The older a blog, the deeper it is buried in your site. A search engine will take more time to retrieve it. Consequently, the search engine’s crawl efficiency will go down, which in turn will affect your site’s ranking. Therefore, augment and reorganize your old blogs to give them a clearer topical focus. Promote some of the top old blog posts on social media channels, as internal linking is one of the best ways to optimise your old blog posts. You may also recycle old blog posts for better exposure, and ensure that your readers always find their way to these posts. For this you may re-share or republish these as evergreen, timeless posts.

Drawbacks of Excessive Unwanted Content

Identifying the “good stuff” from heaps of unwanted content is cumbersome. Additionally, if a search engine always has to browse through a lot of pages or URLs to get to that “good stuff”, it will eventually stop giving more time to comb through your site. This, in turn, will affect the indexing of your pages.

Overcoming the Drawbacks

Build an inventory by using multiple sources

• Export a report from Google Analytics: You get a list of pages and key metrics required to analyse a blog’s performance.
• Export data from Google Search Console: You get SEO analytics which will be exported along with your blog list.
• Run a Screaming Frog Scan: You get the most updated list of URLs from your website.
• Run Xenu’s Link Sleuth: You find broken links on your website.

Filter and Modify your blogs

• List your old blogs for retrieving their URLs.
• Add other relevant metrics like conversion rates, bounce rates, social shares, and backlinks.
• Prioritise the blogs that have had the most impact.

Assess your blogs

• Verify if the content is relevant, informative and intriguing.
• Analyse if it is helping you or your business in any way.
• Check for plagiarism, duplicate content, legal liabilities and so on.

Now divide the blogs into ‘keep’ and ‘not keep’ category before you redirect them to informative blogs or your home page.

What’s next?

What do you think matters more: thousands of visitors instantly or millions of visitors over the years? An old blog is more worthy than a new one because it has matured over time. Your revised old blog can drive a huge amount of organic traffic if you use the right marketing tactics. Therefore, improve, expand, update and promote the ‘keep’ blogs:

• Improve: Target the general writing and grammar. Ensure that your blog has a clear point, targeting specific terms. Add technical improvements in interlinking, alt text or schema mark-up.
• Expand: Update the information the blogs contain to make them fresh. Add the latest data and integrate recent developments or changed opinions.
• Promote: Invest in content optimization by sharing the blogs on social channels, resurfacing them to the front page of your website and promoting them through outreach.

 Whether it is driving traffic on an old blog post or modifying the blog content, our team of experts will strategize and fulfil your objectives. Don’t be hasty in deleting the content as this needs to be reviewed closely from different perspectives like traffic in past, relevance, and cost and value. Call us for a quick assessment of your old blog posts and start getting targeted traffic today