Blogging has quickly become one of the most powerful content marketing tools out there. It’s cheap, easy to manage, and provides a lot of support for SEO and content marketing programs. After a few years of managing a blog, older content becomes outdated or no longer drives traffic. Once a year, you should perform a content audit on your blog to keep old content up-to-date so it continues to be relevant and valuable to your readers.
The MWI blog was established in 2007. You may have noticed that most of our posts are from 2012 or later, but there are still a few from as early as 2007. It’s not that we only posted once or twice a year during that time; we did a content audit to improve the quality of our blog. Given how much technology and marketing tactics have evolved over the last 7 years, I decided it was time to run a content audit. Out of the 106 blog posts, only 20 were found to still be relevant and valuable. Some posts were removed, some were re-purposed or re-targeted, and some were optimized.
It may sound a little crazy to remove content, but it actually has a lot of benefits. If you have a lot of irrelevant and outdated content, then a large portion of the content on your site provides no value to users, which decreases the overall quality of the site. Why maintain content that gives nothing in return to you or your readers?
Some reasons to remove old posts may include:
- A technology mentioned no longer exists
- A product or service discussed is no longer offered
- You no longer do business with a client, partner or affiliate discussed in the post
- Interest in the topic is dead
- An event or offer was discussed that is no longer offered
On the other end of the spectrum, you may have several posts that have are outdated, but can still be re-purposed or re-targeted to provide fresh, valuable content that drives traffic. Once the content has been updated, using social media will also help drive traffic back to those old posts.
Here’s a few things we did to bring old posts back to life on the MWI blog.
- Update the headlines and title tags
- Added or removed some of the content
- Update the strategies, advice and technologies mentioned to keep the advice current with what works today
- Rewrote posts
Sometimes keeping outdated content is useful. For example, we have an old post from 2008 called “Strange Keyword Searches for 2007“. Although this post is completely outdated and search behavior has changed drastically since 2007, this is still great content to keep around and reference in future posts like “How the Keyword Landscape Has Evolved Over the Last 7 Years”. Your old, outdated content can pave way for new content. Doing annual content audits on your company blog keeps your content fresh, valuable and link-worthy.
Are you interested in seeing what your company blog can do for you? Learn more about our content marketing services here.
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