Every company that has a blog or been around for many years has created content that’s now outdated, irrelevant, off-message or seemingly offers no value. So what does a company do with that content?
Content Might Have SEO Value
Whatever happened, these pages now languish in irrelevant purgatory. Forgotten deep in the recesses of the company’s site architecture. These dozens, hundreds or thousands of pages get very little traffic, if any at all. So what should a company do with these pages? We’re glad you asked.
The inspirational SEO public speaker in me wants to say “All pages have value!”, but that’s only partly true. That said, whatever you do, don’t just delete these pages no matter how much your UX, Product, Web Design, or Production teams tell you to do that. If you value SEO, you need to look at these pages with an eye at the search engines.
Whomever created this content put in a lot of work putting those 600 words into the blog post and there could be some benefit that’s not seen with the metrics others are measuring these pages. On the surface, some of these pages may not have any traffic and seemingly has no value, but below the surface, there may be a lot of
Repurpose Landing Pages for SEO
Yes, many of those pages are doing little to nothing, but let’s see how much value the search engines see in these pages. This approach would surface this content that would require a an audit of our pages, blog posts and other resources. Here’s some metrics to look at when trying to determine the SEO value of the page:
- Keyword Rankings
- SEO visits/traffic
- External links pointing at the page
- On-page engagement
With this comprehensive list in hand with the above SEO metrics, we can identify what content is worth repurposing and what we should do to improve them. Here’s a list of 11-12 methods that can be applied depending on each page.
- Optimize content that is in “striking distance”
- Update outdated content / created years ago
- Re-purpose content
- Redirect pages to stronger canonical pages
- Combine multiple pages into one or into an experience
- Add a couple paragraphs
- “Graduate” blog content into higher-converting sections
- Find budget to the page(s) to build links
- Add internal links to the content
- Send internal links to the outdated content
- Refresh SEO titles and descriptions
This is only a partial list of actions we could take. Each page situation is unique and an SEO deep dive to figure out what the best course of action for each would be required. The good news is that most of the work is upfront on SEO’s side, from there, redirecting, repurposing, adding, graduating and optimizing is low to medium effort.
