Beating Content Bloat
By Nicole Hitner, Exago
Blogs remain one of the B2B content marketer’s primary tools, even in this attention-scarce economy. They’re still one of the most powerful drivers of inbound traffic to business domains, and they offer an abundance of ancillary benefits as well: better brand authority, a more educated customer base, improved SEO, and increased web traffic.
But given enough time, blog posts can grow so stale that they stop benefitting your site and even run counter to your marketing objectives. For one thing, large blogs are simply more difficult to navigate. You don’t want your content competing with itself when a site visitor goes looking for information. The last thing you need is irrelevant or outdated blog posts giving prospective customers a negative first impression of your brand.
Large blogs also can be cumbersome to manage. The more pages there are, the harder it is to keep up with redirects and general site health maintenance. Bloated, error-prone sites may also lose crawl budget. If a website has lots of slow pages and/or stale content, search engines won’t bother crawling the whole site and instead keep to what it sees as the most relevant pages. Follow these steps to find your crawl budget, and if it’s getting dangerously close to the red zone, it might be time to prune. Not sure where to start? We’ve put together a five-step plan to help you through the process.
1. Review
First, develop an internal rubric for assessing content and use it to identify stale articles. While auditing your entire blog might be the most thorough approach, it’s also very time consuming. Consider auditing only those posts that fail to meet a baseline qualification instead. For example, you might audit all posts that weren’t published in the last two years or all posts visited fewer than 200 times in the last year. You could even combine qualifiers! Just pick a cutoff that makes sense to you and your team, then sort the posts into two piles: “leave as-is” and “address.”
Once you have your subset, consider the following attributes as you evaluate each post:
- Relevance. Does the post still have something to offer your audience? It can sometimes be hard to tell, particularly with newsy posts. Should the public still be able to access that release announcement you posted three years ago, even though your company has published 6 new versions of the product since then? Should they still be able to read about how you won some SaaS award in 2012? Perhaps, but perhaps not if you also won the same award in 2016 and 2018. Keep an eye out for old news, deprecated features, and redundancies.
- Quality. It’s no secret that blog managers and writers get better with practice, so don’t be afraid to ding an old post on quality. If an article fails to meet your more evolved standards, put it in the to-be-dealt-with pile. Some questions to consider: Does the post provide enough detail? Does it have enough visual interest? Are the outbound links still intact, the images to spec, and the layout optimized for SEO? Does it target the appropriate keywords? Does it cover similar ground as another post but less effectively?
- Effectiveness. Take a look at your Google Analytics metrics for these posts and see if they’re generating adequate traffic. (What qualifies as “adequate” will depend on your averages.) Consider sidelining content with subpar performance.
Once you have your list of addressable posts, it’s time to decide what to do with them. The following three R’s outline your main options.
2. Recycle
Sometimes evergreen pieces need a little sprucing up to stay fresh. Reserve the recycle option for posts that speak to a relevant subject but aren’t performing well. Maybe their SEO is a bit outdated, or perhaps their content would be better suited to a different medium. Update the post according to its deficiencies and promote it as you would a brand-new article. Be sure to update the date of publication but keep the original URL so that you can see the post’s performance over its life cycle.
The screenshot below shows pageviews for a blog post before and after it was recycled. We found the original copy to be lacking in explanatory depth, not very visually engaging, and also not as optimized for SEO as it could be. We therefore replaced the banner image, added examples to each term definition, included icons for easier scanning, and added two term-comparison sections. These efforts had a dramatic impact on the page’s discoverability and relevance.
If you’re not sure how best to revitalize an old piece of content, but you know it has potential, here are some options to get the ideas flowing:
- Try a new genre. Would this post be better as a video, webinar, infographic, whitepaper, or quiz?
- Add depth. Always do your utmost to generate helpful content. That might mean doing more research the second time around.
- Optimize. If you’ve got an SEO tool like Moz or SEMrush ready to hand, search keywords related to your post and see if you’re optimizing for the terms that will give you the most bang for your blog post.
- Reformat. Make the post easier to scan by breaking up long paragraphs into shorter ones, adding relevant images, drawing the eye to some stylized pull quotes, and introducing subheadings where appropriate.
- Mashup. Do you have another related post that also feels in need of an update? Maybe putting the two together will create that pillar piece you’re looking for.
Sometimes recycling isn’t in the cards, in which case, you might consider moving your post to a different platform altogether.
3. Retarget
No, this has nothing to do with remarketing or ad retargeting. If you suspect a post would perform better in front of a different audience, try shopping it around to publishers who accept non-exclusive content. If published, the article could generate linkbacks and referral traffic while broadening your visibility and contributing to your brand image. Retargeting is a great option for more top-of-funnel pieces that are more niche than your standard fare. Use it to lure specific personas to your site.
4. Retire
Some posts simply don’t make sense to revitalize, either because they were time-sensitive to begin with or because their content no longer fits with your messaging.
The software industry in particular evolves at such a breakneck speed that content volatility is practically unavoidable. What might have been technologically noteworthy two years ago could easily be par for the course today. It’s easy for readers not to realize they’re looking at an old post and become confused about what your product offers, so consider sunsetting content accordingly.
Instead of deleting a post, simply take it down and save it as a draft. Confirm that it’s been removed from your sitemap and is no longer being indexed by search engines. This way, if you change your mind, you can easily repost the article with a click.
5. Reduce
Once you’ve audited your content and either recycled, retargeted, or retired stale pieces, ask yourself what you might do to lengthen the lifespan of future blog posts. Consider what kinds of posts got pruned. Were they mostly time-sensitive pieces with fixed expiration dates, or were most of them lacking in quality? If the latter, consider publishing less often and giving your team more time to work on each article. Formalize the editing process and ensure that each post meets quality standards before it is published. The more care you put into content creation up front, the less often you’ll need to audit your blog for stale posts.
Enjoy your fresh, lightweight blog! Visitors will reward you for making your best material easy to find.
About The Author
Nicole Hitner is Content Strategist at Exago, Inc., producers of embedded business intelligence for software companies. She manages the company’s content marketing, writes for their blog, hosts their podcast Data Talks, and assists the product design team in continuing to enhance Exago BI. You can reach her at content@exagoinc.com.