Content Maintenance: How regularly you audit your content

Developing your website means you will have more new posts. Some posts might be related to similar topics and even though you might have categorized properly, your site content might compete from keyword cannibalization. Also, some articles might be too old and not entirely correct now. Well, you will have to perform content maintenance for preventing all this. In many cases, content maintenance is all about combining and deleting content. Read further to know what need to be done at the time of content maintenance for SEO purpose.

Audit your content

The first and foremost step is to search for the content for keyword research. This is a simple process where you have keyword research tag and the content is properly tagged. According to a site, by searching in Google some missing articles were found that the biggest search engine considered for keyword research. When searched on yoast.com for “keyword research”, Google showed all the pages and posts on the site that mentioned this topic.

There were 18 articles in total either for keyword research or had larger sections mentioning it. Another 20 of them had mentioned it linking with other articles. The reason to audit content for specific keywords simple is to improve rankings around the group of keywords for keyword research. Professionals of a reputed SEO agency in London have said, it is important to analyze the pages that were ranking higher and the ones that were not. This content maintenance was extremely necessary in this case.

Evaluate performance of content

When going through Google Search Console and Performance section, I clicked on the filter bar. Then, I clicked on Query and typed “keyword research” in the box like this: This has made Google Search Console to match all your queries with words like keyword and research. Thus, you will get important aspects of data:

1. A list of keywords your website had shown in search results and click-through rate (CTR) and clicks for those specific keywords;

2. A list of the web pages that received all the traffic and the amount of traffic each page received.

I looked at the total number of clicks we received for all the queries and then checked individual pages. There was something that got cleared immediately and three pages were getting 99% traffic. But there were 18 articles that covered this topic. It was the right time to clean them up and we would not delete any posts getting traffic but wasn’t included. Therefore, I decided to check every post separately.

Query filter was removed and another option used which is the Page filter. This enables you to filter by a specific URL or group of URLs. For larger websites, you might filter by groups of URLs and in this case, data was checked for each post individually.

Decision time

Experts at DubSEO said, while going through each post in the content maintenance process, it was finally decided what should be done – whether to keep it or delete it. If I decided to delete posts, we should delete it and I also decided the post that should be redirected. The more posts I had decided to redirect to SEO for Beginners post, “What is keyword research?” The posts related to keyword research tools had been redirected that helps you to choose a keyword research tool. Other ones I finally decided to redirect to the ultimate guide to keyword research.

For each post, I assessed if they had some sections that needed to be combined with another article. Some posts even had paragraphs or full sections that could be merged in another post.

One post was found that did not rank for keyword research, yet it should be kept since it discussed about long tail keywords specifically. It had an apparent reach for the terms that should not be deleted and so, it was decided to redirect other articles about the topic to that particular article.

Take necessary action

Finally, it was the right time to take proper action. There was the list of action items: content that should be added to specific articles before deletion. With Yoast SEO Premium, 301 redirect a page or a post can be done easily before you delete it.

With that, 18 specific articles were taken proper care and only 4 had been retained. There was still the list of 20 articles that discussed about the topic and linked with one of other articles. Each of them had been checked properly and ensured each linked to one or more of 4 articles in the suitable section.

Content maintenance is actually a lot of hard work

You must be aware that content maintenance is all about “that’s a lot of work”. Yes, this is so very true. Well, you do not write about only keyword research and so, this process should be done several times in a year. This is said to be a repeated content maintenance strategy:

1. Audit and know the type of content you have

2. Analyze and know how content performs

3. Decide which content you need to keep and which should be deleted

4. Act in the right way.

Thus, “all” you should do is go through this procedure once in a year for the important set of keywords that you really want your website to get higher ranking.

Author Bio: Sanjiv Barnwal is responsible for improving companies organic search result on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many other big search engines. Sanjiv creates and launches SEO, PPC, and Facebook campaigns. Sanjiv also identifies areas of improvement and optimizes website content to improve the DubSEO website ranking on the major search engines. He is a writer who loves to write articles and blogs on different topics. Some of his great work includes – how to write SEO blogs, how to do Instagram marketing in London, why online marketing is gaining immense popularity and much more