The Zen of Cleaning Your Blog
Ah, August. Nothing like paying through the nose for precious AC, sweating through every item of clothing you have, and subsisting on iced everything. But this brutally hot month can also make for a perfect time to do that type of low-thought but high-value work you’ve been putting off all summer or year long. After all, do you really feel like devising a new link building strategy when you’re just trying to stay hydrated? This month we’re going to take a look at one of our favorite ways to drop dead content and give old blogs a new life: cleaning your blog.
If you run a site with a blog you’ve been keeping active for a few years or simply have a whole bunch of content on your site that you haven’t updated in eons, it can be easy to let all this content accrue for the sake of covering the spread, so to speak. After all, the more content the better, right? That is what we’re always saying, right?
Well, not exactly. While we’re all about fresh content, we’ve even more about smart, fresh content. After all, why put a week of work into a piece that will be out of style or outdated in a week or month? Sure, there’s much to be said for producing timely content, but what about when that content ceases to be timely? This is why evergreen content–content that will still be relevant a year from now–should make up at least half of what you produce.
Worse yet, what does it say when you’re writing about a topic, like SEO, and the most recent article you have on AdWords is from 2013, a veritable lifetime in the world of digital marketing. That’s when it makes sense to start cleaning your blog and take a long, hard look at the data in Google Analytics to see just which content is still driving traffic and which pieces died a short, quick death years ago.
But, seeing that you likely put a bit of time and money into that article on the HTTPS rankings “bump” announcement a few years back, why trash the whole thing? This is where cleaning house makes sense from an SEO standpoint in addition to user perception because as we’ve stated time and time again, Google and users love fresh content. Thus, rather than just deleting that HTTPS article, mine it for points that are still relevant and then do some research to update that piece for the present moment. If you have a piece that’s aged particularly well, or not so well, highlight that fact in a new article that compares your original points to what’s happened since then.
For all of your articles that have ceased to drive traffic or the traffic that they do drive is nominal, see what can be salvaged–even if it’s just the topic itself. By taking stock of your old and outdated content and cleaning your blog, you can quickly and easily perform a site overhaul that will yield you a whole lot of fresh and relevant content that will have Google sending you plenty of new traffic in no time!
