In some cases, old blogs can contain outdated and no longer relevant information. In those cases, it probably does make sense to remove those posts. But for many blogs, old content can still be relevant, and more importantly, may still drive a LOT of traffic to your website.
So how should you decide what blogs to remove and what to keep?
- Look at Google Analytics.
Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website. Log in and take a peek at your blog content traffic trends. I like to look back at least 6 months to get a closer look at overall traffic. You can use the “behavior” tab in analytics to see page traffic and then sort by your blog URLs. Here’s an example from our site:
- Sort by top traffic earners.
Identify the posts that are earning the most traffic. In this example, you can see that many of our top-performing posts are older. This isn’t surprising. It can take time for content to gain authority in Google and earn search traffic. It isn’t an indication that your new content isn’t working, it just shows that the older content is still relevant and is earning search cred! - Review posts on a case-by-case basis.
One of our top traffic earners is from 2018 and it’s about background videos in websites. As you can imagine, some things have changed since then. In this case, we should consider updating this particular post with more current information. BUT, instead of just deleting this post, I’m recommending to our creative team that they write a new post on Best Background Website Videos – 2020 Edition. We will still keep this old post from 2018 (because it still has way more clout than the new post will on day one). Then once we have the new 2020 post, we can put an update at the top of the 2018 post and link to our new content. - Review data in Google Search Console.
In addition to Google Analytics, search console provides us with some great data. I would take your full blog URL (in this case: https://www.haleymarketing.com/2018/09/30/5-examples-of-background-video-in-websites/) and look more closely at the data in search console. Here’s what I see:
This data shows me what “search queries” people are typing into search, where my blog shows up in search results, and what my click-through rate is. I can use this in a few ways:- I could go back and reoptimize this content with phrases like “Websites with video Background”. I chose this from the list because it had the highest number of impressions. If we can improve our rank for this term and go from an average position 7.9 to a top 3 position, we will earn more traffic.
- I could use these terms in the new 2020 post I”m going to write and hopefully earn 2 different top ten rankings for my content.
- I could create an entire new series of posts/content around website videos and use the search queries above.
Old blog content still has value.
Are there some cases in which you should delete old posts? Sure. But in most cases you’ll find that old content still has a lot of value both in terms of traffic, and in providing you with the education and data necessary to make smart content development choices moving forward.
Want great blog content for your staffing website?
Haley Marketing offers amazing blogging and SEO programs for staffing agencies. We leverage the same tactics I outlined below to help our clients improve search results, drive more inbound website and search traffic, and generate more business. Contact us today to learn more!
