Outdated or poorly written content is bad for your website. It becomes a huge factor when it comes to losing traffic, clicks, and social shares. It can also adversely impact your brand reputation, as negligence with regard to content demonstrates disrespect for your target audience.
Using Content Audit, you can quickly identify blog posts to rewrite and to update.
How can this be done?
- Set up Content Audit for your domain.
- Choose the /blog subfolder from your sitemap or upload your links manually by browsing a file, then run the audit.
- Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
- In the Content Sets tab you’ll see your articles broken down into four categories: Rewrite or remove (pages published more than 24 months ago and viewed less than 15 times in the last 30 days), Need to update (pages published more than 6 months ago and viewed less than 15 times in the last 30 days), Quick review (pages published less than 6 months ago and viewed more than 150 times in the last 30 days), and Poor content (pages less than 200 words long).
- Prioritize the sets in accordance with your content strategy (e.g. if you plan to attract traffic, start with Poor content, as such short articles don’t rank well) or based on the number of URLs in each set and start analyzing each set, article by article (look at metrics like word count, shares, backlinks, sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, number of search queries, content update date, status, tags).
- Press “Add Your Set” button and choose the performance criteria (like word count, backlinks, search queries, etc.) to group your content by.
- Update/rewrite/remove the content or set the tasks for your team via Collaboration menu.
Next Steps
Updating/rewriting existing content is cheaper, quicker, and oftentimes easier than creating new articles. Not to mention, it’s an essential element of an effective content marketing strategy. Here’s what you can do with it:
- Identify your successes and failures to create better content for your audience.
- Improve SEO performance for better organic reach.
- Increase CTR as up-to-date articles are more relevant for the reader’s query.
- Create a more consistent style and tone of voice across the blog.
Once you rewrite an article, don’t forget to track how your results change after the update. Click on the article in the “Table” tab of the Content Audit tool, then click on “Save today`s data” button. You will be able to compare the state of your article before and after the update and analyze its progress.
If you need ideas on how to improve the quality of your content, you can try SEO Writing Assistant to get doable recommendations based on the analysis of the high-ranking article.