How To Do Website Content Housekeeping

How To Do Website Content Housekeeping

When you are doing routine website content housekeeping, you will come across old content. Most website owners do not know what to do with such content.

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Old content can hurt the authority of your website. As such, you have two options – to remove it or improve it.  Making the right decision can be rewarding. It can increase organic traffic, conversions, links, engagement, and visibility on search engines. Simply put, it is excellent for your SEO campaign.

The primary objective of Google is to make useful information accessible to the world. This is still their main goal to date.

Content marketing has changed significantly over the years. After the first Google Panda update, businesses realized that content is king. In response, they created all types of content. Some of the material was fantastic. Most of it was average. A considerable percentage of the content was poor. 

Although websites are publishing content at a high rate, most of it is redundant. In 2016, the internet had 130 trillion web pages and Google does not index all of them due to a number of reasons such as poor structure, relevance, lack of optimization, and many other reasons. 

You have to rethink your website content strategy if you want Google to index your pages. Ideally, the content should be useful, relevant, and optimized.

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Website Content Housekeeping Hacks

Rethinking Your Content Strategy

According to Google, removing content can hurt your SEO efforts. This is not true. Removing old material from your site can increase organic traffic by 60%. It also increases the number of views per webpage.

It is worth noting that removing archived pages does not affect indexed pages. It, however, increases the engagement levels on your website.

Here are the steps you should take when removing or improving old content.

Audit Your Content

The first step is auditing and assessing your website content. After analysis, you should class the content into three categories. These are useful content, useless content, and content that is can hurt your site.

There are many crawlers you can use to perform this process. The best are Deepcrawl, Oncrawl, Sitebulb, and Botify.

Once you are through with crawling, you need to inspect other on-page elements. First, check if the titles and URLs are SEO-friendly.

You should then check the author and publication date. The author should be an expert on the subject of the content. The publication date should tell you if the content is fresh or outdated.

The next step involves checking the number of reads. The more reads, the better. It is an indicator that your audience likes that content. After reviewing the number of reads, look at the word count. The content should be broad and detailed.

Lastly, you should assess the number of links. Ensure that the content has an adequate number of internal links and backlinks. They should also be of high quality.

Evaluate the Quality of Your Content

Once you complete the site audit, move on to evaluating the quality of your content.

High-quality content is accurate, informative, and engaging. It also solves problems and answers the readers’ questions. Low-quality content lacks optimization, has no audience, and has no objectives.

According to Google, quality content is useful, valuable, and credible. Google also uses E-A-T to gauge the quality of content. E-A-T is a combination of three terms – expertise, authority, and trust.

Expertise refers to your mastery of a specific area. Your content gets authority when other people recognize your expertise. Trust is when others believe in your content and are ready to buy your ideas.

Google considers content as low-quality if it has inadequate E-A-T. Other elements that contribute to this include poor title, distractions, shallow content, and a negative reputation of the site.

website content housekeeping

As mentioned above, you can find it challenging to deal with old website content. In October 2015, Google’s Gary Illyes said that they do not recommend removing old content. Instead, you should add high-quality stuff.

Later on, Illyes said that removing content does not guarantee any improvements. He added that only indexed pages affect your ranking on SERPs. This means that old non-indexed content has no impact on your site’s ranking.

In a separate forum about website content housekeeping, Google’s John Mueller shared a different opinion. John said that improving your content improves your ranking. He also stated that removing old stuff lowers your site ranking.

Both Mueller and Illyes are clearly against content removal. The idea came from Google’s Michael Wyszomierski back in 2011. Michael suggested that migrating low-quality content could improve the ranking of a website.

Content Inequality

If you run an audit on your site, you are likely to find out that some content is more popular than others. This is known as content inequality.

What Determines Quality Content?

It is challenging to identify the factors you should use to measure the quality of your content. Even worse, Google officials are issuing contradicting statements.

Metrics such as page views, organic traffic, and links are an excellent starting point. You can also measure quality using the number of conversions and engagement levels.

Ultimately, many variables affect the quality of your content. It is advisable to judge yourself when evaluating your content.

Choose What to Do with Your Existing Content

The last step in this process requires deciding the best course of action. Your decision should be data-driven. You can either remove or improve the content.

The improvement involves updating, rewriting, or consolidating content. Removal means that you de-index the content from search engines.

Here are the five actions you could take on the content.

Keep it as it is

You can opt to leave your website content unchanged. Go for this option if your content is accurate and has historical value. It should also get high engagement levels and consistent traffic.

Additionally, you can keep your content if it ranks on the first page of search results. It should also have quality links and generate many conversions.

If your content is already productive, do not change it. Focus on areas that need improvement.

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Content Update and Refreshing

Sometimes, your website content might need refreshing. Such content usually generates traffic but has low conversions.  It can also have a high ranking and low engagement levels.

There are three ways of improving the content that is performing poorly. First, you need to update the information so that it becomes accurate. After this, ensure that it is better than the content on competing sites. Lastly, keep it on the same URL.

Refreshing your content gets results within a short time. You should notice more views, a better ranking, and more reads.

Rewriting Content

If your content is getting little or no traffic, you might need to revise it. The same applies if it has no conversions and a poor ranking on search results.

In most cases, content that needs rewriting has a compelling title and a mediocre body. The best way to solve this issue is by starting from scratch. Update the information to achieve accuracy. You will also need to create a new optimized URL for the content.

When creating the new URL, maintain the title from the old content. After rewriting, your content will rank higher and get more engagements. With time, it should generate conversions.

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Content Consolidation

This is probably one of the most important website content housekeeping processes. If you have many articles covering one topic, you should consolidate them. You should also combine content when two pages are competing on the same search result page.

Mueller mentioned that Google has no issues with the consolidation of content.  He said that if you combine several pages, Google will consider the resultant content as more valuable than the original.

If you want to consolidate content, you will have to start anew. Make sure that you extract all useful information from your old content. If such content needs updating, do it. Keep in mind that your content has to be better than that on competing websites. After you draft the content, post it under a new optimized URL. 

The results of consolidating should become noticeable after a short while. You will get more traffic and views, as well as a higher ranking on Google.

Content Deletion and De-Indexing

Your content needs immediate deletion if it is shallow and irrelevant. Moreover, you should remove if it is plagiarised or it has poor quality.  The signs of low-quality content are few or no links, shares, conversions, and traffic.

When you remove content from your site, Google will de-index it the next time it crawls your site. It will no longer appear in search results. This means that it cannot hurt your ranking as users would not see the poor content.


Best Website Content Analysis Tools to Boost Your Online Marketing Campaigns

Since we have established the most significant website content behavior hacks and the factors that determine quality content, it’s time to explore the best content analysis tools to improve your digital marketing campaigns.

Here are the top ten best content analysis tools you can count on to take your business a notch higher. 

Google Analytics Tool

Google Analytics is a free in-house tool. It monitors the user’s behavior on your website.  It has a user-friendly interface with many vital features, outstanding reporting schemes and you can easily track, measure, and manage your website’s performance. 

Google analytics key features that can help you gain valuable insights include;

  • The tool provides comprehensive visitor demographic data, and it can track specific types of audience behavior against the typical visitors. 
  • It can help you view website visitor’s conversion paths and the routes from the first action to conversion. 
  • Discover unusual traffic patterns and reasons behind the shift.
  • Traffic tends compared to previous periods.
  • Establish how traffic aligns with marketing goals and how the audience progresses through the objective’s funnels.

Here are six Google pro-tips you need to know

  1. Use audience data when creating custom visitor segments; this will help you establish an in-depth overview of your target audience. 
  2. Allocate a monetary value to your marketing goal flow to gauge how much money you lose on leads lost in the purchase funnel.  
  3. Examine the entire conversion path to gain a glimpse into users’ behavior on your website.
  4. Set up intelligence events; this provides custom parameters to monitor unusual site activity and send alerts to the assigned account managers. 
  5. Identify traffic patterns compared to previous traffic to obtain valuable insights on how your website’s traffic has changed over time.
  6. Adding annotations to your analytics reporting graphics, elaboration on the traffic rise and falls helps the account managers keep tabs on any promotional campaigns or other marketing information. 

Pros 

  • It provides detailed and easy-to-use reporting.
  • Excellent real-time tracking and monitoring.
  • Has AI automated insights.
  • It allows you to segment traffic for analysis.
  • It shows traffic sources such as organic search, referrals, or direct.

Cons

  • The free version doesn’t provide accurate cookie reporting, only sampling.
  • It’s slow when analyzing substantial data sets.
  • Its over-relays on third parties for training. 

 

HubSpot 

Hubspot brings an entire marketing funnel together, from attracting visitors to closing customers. Some of its key features include:

Marketers can access all the above under a single roof. You, therefore, do not need to flip between multiple systems or export data to create performance reports.

Pros

  1. HubSpot collects data on all your marketing efforts, from where your traffic is coming from and users engaging with your email content to your website’s performance and how many clicks your social media posts get. 
  2. Provides powerful segmentation options which allow you to create more personalized, contextual marketing campaigns.
  3. HubSpot’s marketing hub has automation features (such as scheduling social media posts and receiving email notifications) and an entire automation engine called workflows that marketers can use to automate tasks from lead qualification to email campaigns. 
  4. HubSpot provides straightforward tools to capture leads. These features include, call to actions buttons, drag and drop landing pages, and simple web forms to build end-to-end conversion paths. 
  5. The easy-to-use drag and drop builder feature enables non-technical marketers to create full conversion paths for emails and landing pages. 

Cons

  1. HubSpot’s marketing hub comes with a requirement for contact subscriptions. 
  2. There are limited templates to assist you in getting started with automation. 

Hootsuite 

Social media plays a huge role when it comes to content marketing. Hootsuite plays a vital role in the management and scheduling of social media posts. It can help you increase your business growth through features, such as;

  • Identify potential marketing influencers. 
  • Reply to all comments and mentions on the dashboard.
  • Schedule posts and publish automatically at the most appropriate time. 
  • Curate more target messages based on your audience location and demographics.
  • Obtain and share real-time insights by tracking mentions. 
  • Boost performance on your social advertising through campaign optimization features. 

Pros

  1. Save time by creating and scheduling posts in advance. 
  2. You can interact and engage with your audience on a single platform.
  3. It has a media library that comes in handy when you run out of images.
  4. Insights and data can be accessed at any time and are updated frequently. 
  5. Easy to track and monitor posting and campaign performance.
  6. You can create customizable reports from insights obtained. 

Cons

  1. The pro account allows only a limited number of social media channels.
  2. It doesn’t have tagging as one of the main features. 

SEMrush

SEMrush is an SEO tool that focuses on keyword search, Google Ad optimizations, and competitors’ analysis. It helps you achieve great results which offer insights into the competitiveness and relevance of your website content. 

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Its features include: 

  • Best Keyword search.
  • Website traffic analysis.
  • Paid Ad research.
  • Keyword gap analytics.
  • Analytics reports.
  • Backlinks building.
  • Website audit. 

Pros

  1. The keyword Gap analysis tool is excellent for competitor’s research and informs content calendars with ideas.
  2. Backlink audit makes it easy to access and review links.
  3. It offers an excellent breakdown of influential keyword ranking.
  4. It intuitively allows users to segment keywords.
  5. Organic keywords are analyzed for any domain.
  6. They offer daily search engine results page (SERP) tracking. 

Cons

  1. It has limited social media reporting metrics.
  2. It shows a lot of data at once.
  3. Default emailing of reports to users.

 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo online marketing tool provides digital marketers with popular content topics within their niche and domain. It analyses online content and finds pieces that align with your content marketing strategy enabling you to curate content that resonates with your target audience.

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BuzzSumo features allow you to;

  • Discover vital information to improve your content research and planning process. 
  • It will assist you in discovering the most shared topics in your niche. 
  • Enables you to keep track of your competitor’s content performance easily.
  • Allows you to discover new trending topics.
  • It helps you develop new content ideas.
  • Find influencers for partnerships.  

Pros

  1. BuzzSumo is essential when building backlinks.
  2. It displays relevant metrics for trending web and social content.
  3. It helps find relevant influencers.
  4. It makes it easy to stay updated on trending topics.
  5. It works well as a monitoring and analytical tool.
  6. The platform provides real-time data and analysis.

Cons

  1. It has a high price tag for small companies.
  2. BuzzSumo has a limited number of search options for a free trial.
  3. A filter to differentiate news and general topics. 

 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is beneficial in every stage of content creation and planning content. It helps analyze and suggest the right keywords for your brand

Some of the most vital features include:

  • Ahref has a supported keyword explorer for search engines like YouTube, Amazon, Google, and Bing.
  • It goes beyond search volume and shows the estimated number of clicks on search results.
  • The tool provides total search traffic estimations for the top 10 ranking pages.
  • It shows backlink growth.
  • It helps you understand your competitor’s sites structures along with which pages have the most traffic attraction.
  • Allows you to analyze click distribution for particular keywords.
  • Examines the SERP history.
  • The tool tracks and monitors your site’s outbound links. 

Pros

  • The tool gives each keyword click rate metrics.
  • It showcases content gap analysis.
  • It has the best link database.
  • Creates valuable keyword and link filtering reports 

Cons

  • Its cost is higher compared to other tools.
  • It has a few ready-to-use integrations with other services.
  • Maybe slow when scanning huge websites. 

 

Crazyegg

Crazyegg helps you figure out what’s working and what’s not working for your website. 

Here are two crucial pointers about the tool.

  1. You can utilize Crazyegg to implement changes that make your website generate better results.
  2. It is suitable for non-technical marketers.

The tool has vital features such as:

  • Mouse recording and heatmaps.
  • Analysis and reporting features.
  • Platform integrations.
  • Targeting and personalization.
  • Research and user feedback. 

The tool helps understand your site’s visitor’s preferences to maximize your sales and leads.

Pros

  • Heat mapping is essential as it shows where people are scrolling and what they are doing on your website.
  • It provides a visual representation of user behavior.
  • It has an easy and fast setup. 
  • It shows clearly what elements of your content are getting the most interaction.
  • The tool provides data-driven recommendations for Conversion Rate Optimization.
  • The confetti click map lets you visualize clicks by segments, i.e., device, new/returning visitors, campaigns, and other metrics.

Cons

  • Its free version only allows you to track a limited number of pages.
  • Only a limited number of snapshots can run simultaneously.
  • It doesn’t have an integrated A/B testing capability.

 

Screaming Frog

Screaming frog is an SEO developer tool used to crawl website URLs to examine technical and SEO at scale without affecting the site’s performance.

The tool can help you;

  • Discover duplicate content on your site.
  • Identify broken links.
  • Perform audit redirects.
  • It can Analyse page titles and metadata.
  • Generate XML sitemaps.
  • Easy to integrate with Google analytics, page speed insights, and google search console APIs.
  • It helps you to visualize websites architectures easily.
  • It Provides custom extractions.

Pros

  • Check status codes for a set of URLs by simply copying and pasting the URLs into the open box to see the status code, response time, and potential redirects.
  • Crawl URLs for a Custom Text save time in verifying proper analytics implementation codes across the entire website. 
  • It identifies and shows Canonical Links on your site
  • Website crawler is solid and makes it easy to export results into a spreadsheet.
  • It analyses page titles and metadata of your website to improve search engine optimization.
  • It assists in identifying broken links, i.e., pages that give 404 error messages. 

Cons

  • Its free version is limited.
  • Crawling big websites takes a lot of memory and time.   

 

Surfer 

Surfer is a data-driven analysis tool that allows users to evaluate and optimize their site’s content. It has a SERP analyzer that analyses best practices implemented by your competitor for effective positioning. It also provides Google bots screenshots to help you understand how the Google search engine views your site. 

The tool also provides valuable information on how Google renders your site’s pages for possible optimization of your page elements. It analyses internal and external linking that is essential for improving navigation. The content text editor evaluates the optimization of text used for SEO and provides information on how many words need to be reviewed for optimum results.

Its five main core features include:

  1. Content editor.
  2. SERP Analyse.
  3. SEO Audit.
  4. Keyword Research.
  5. Keyword Surfer.

Pros

  1. Surfer provides a list of actual LSI keywords, right contextual keywords, or phrases that align with the primary keyword.
  2. It has a user-friendly interface. 
  3. It assists in analyzing your content structure.
  4. It provides semantic analysis that shows a comparison of the keywords used among the top website.
  5. It has multiple views: you can scan through a SERP view, table view, and chart view. 
  6. Surfer SEO utilizes more than 500 ranking factors that compare your website with competitors that rank high on SERPs. 

Cons

  1. The number of queries available is based on your choice of plan.
  2. Too many suggestions compromise content readability.
  3. Its keyword feature doesn’t have enough metrics.

 

Click Flow

Click flow examines your site content and provides actionable suggestions and possible fixes to get back on track to growing your organic traffic. Its main features include:

  1. It has an SEO effectiveness test that measures each of your site’s pages to obtain valuable information to improve on your marketing strategy.
  2. It allows testing multiple URLs at the same time.
  3. Click flow measures how much revenue you obtain.
  4. The tool provides automated reports. 
  5. It keeps you updated by sending relevant notifications on available opportunities.  

Pros

  1. Click flow has only a trial of 21 days for all plans.
  2. It has a live chat support feature.
  3. It provides valuable information on its blog and FAQs sections.

 Cons

  1. Your website should have at least 100k organic visitors per month for the tool to run and provide accurate results.
  2. It can only run several URLs on the premium plan.

Conclusion

Content is king. A website with high-quality content attracts more traffic. This, in turn, translates into more leads and potentially more sales. The key to a successful online presence is by having great content on your website. 

You should conduct website content housekeeping regularly. Start with auditing to discover the old content on your website. Once you finish auditing, evaluate the content. This allows you to see what needs improvement and what you should delete.  Before taking action, use relevant metrics to measure the quality of the content.

Call us today at +65 6789 9852 for tips on how to create a custom content marketing strategy for your brand.

About the Author

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Tom Koh

Tom is the CEO and Principal Consultant of MediaOne, a leading digital marketing agency. He has consulted for MNCs like Canon, Maybank, Capitaland, SingTel, ST Engineering, WWF, Cambridge University, as well as Government organisations like Enterprise Singapore, Ministry of Law, National Galleries, NTUC, e2i, SingHealth. His articles are published and referenced in CNA, Straits Times, MoneyFM, Financial Times, Yahoo! Finance, Hubspot, Zendesk, CIO Advisor.

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