Do you have a blog on your website? Have you contributed to it year after year but with little to no results in traffic to show for it? Maybe it’s time you took a closer look at the content.
Ask yourself the following questions while you’re doing so: am I finding what I’m looking for in this blog post? Is this relevant to my everyday life, or is it a passing trend? How bad is the spelling and grammar? Whatever you do though, do not ask: should I just delete this post?
Deleting posts means you could be losing valuable content that you may think is irrelevant when in fact it could do your company more good by recycling the content. How? By following these steps to recycle blog content, without unintentionally creating duplicate content.
Why to Recycle Instead of Delete
Deleting older blog posts may not be the best idea, because it depends on what kind of content you are presenting. Some of the best information online is considered to be evergreen content – content that outlasts trends such as fashion and popular culture. Examples of evergreen content worth recycling on blogs includes cooking, relationships, marriage, children, dentistry, animal care, and more. Removing these types of blog posts or blog posts that are actually generating traffic for your website could actually do your blog more harm than good.
By deleting blog content, you also run the risk of removing valuable links, both internal and external, rendering any link-building strategies for your content completely useless. Additionally, you will lose those links if you published older posts to your social media accounts, which can also create a big mess you don’t need. To recycle, then, is to retain and continually improve and grow your overall content marketing strategy.
Revamp Older Content
There’s more than one way to cover a topic in your blog – you just have to know which synonym keywords to use. Conduct keyword research before tackling this part, that way you get some help while writing and apply white-hat SEO to your blog.
You can also try compiling multiple posts into one. Let’s say your blog is for a travel agency, for example. You’ve written two similar posts on two different cities, but both posts have very little content to go on, so you’re stuck with some thin content. Why not combine these two posts into one if they’re so similar? The other solution is to add more content to each page that is unique (i.e. don’t copy and paste text onto each page – search engines are smart enough to pick up on that).
Additionally, you can beef up your newer content while referring to the older stuff by adding images and videos to really get a point across.
When to Really Delete Older Blog Content
At the end of the day, if your older content is truly not worth having around, if it’s too poorly written or completely unsalvageable, if their SEO is bad, and if they’re doing more harm to your company than good, you may need to cave in and delete your content. To do so properly, use Google Webmaster Tools so that your content is no longer being indexed by search engines. This is the only way to really tell Google you do not want to feature poorly written content on your site’s blog.
For more tips and tricks to blogging, or if you need assistance with your current content marketing strategy, contact us at V3 Media. We can help with your blog as well as provide valuable SEO solutions for your website overall.