If you or your organization has owned and operated a blog for any number of years you probably have lots of underperforming blog post a post that is no longer relevant or just plain old and terrible. You may be tempted to just keep it for posterity sake. However, these old posts are not neutral in their overall effect on the performance of your website. Poor content can actually drag down your SEO score with Google. Deleting them outright if not done correctly can also negatively affect your SEO score. It may feel like you are between a rock and a hard place. So what should you do with them?
Does your Underperforming Blog Post fit into your Content Strategy?
Having a content strategy is more important than having a weekly blog. Don’t blog just to blog. This is how you end up with an underperforming post, to begin with. Blog with the purpose of generating content that targets key phrases you want people to find your website. So consider your overall strategy and compare your old and underperforming post to that strategy. Do they fit in?
Rewrite and Freshen up the Post
Perhaps a little refresh is all it would take to make that underperforming blog post up to date and more in line with your content strategy. Trying improving it. Add additional content clean up the grammar. Use Grammarly to make recommendations not just on grammar and spelling, but to also recommend different ways of saying what you’re trying to say. Grammarly is a great tool for this and I highly recommend it.
Tune up the SEO on that Underperforming Blog Post
Sometimes your blog just needs an SEO tune-up. Using a plugin like Yoast SEO can help you with this. Instead of a keyword use a keyphrase. Find ways to add that keyphrase in the title, first sentence, in a heading, etc. This may inspire you along the way to rewrite parts of your content. Follow the prompts that Yoast SEO gives to make your post SEO friendly for that keyphrase.
TIP: Make sure your blog images have alternative text. This is for blind people reading the internet. It helps with the accessibility of your content, but can also give you an SEO Boost.
The post is just so Outdated and Irrelevant what now?
Delete it, BUT before you do redirect it. Use 301 Redirects to redirect traffic from that content to a similar piece that is more in line with your Content Strategy and is SEO Ready. 301 Redirects will satisfy the search engines when it comes to missing content and not doing your SEO. Also by deleting this content and redirecting to a better-written piece of content it also removes the ding you have against your website for poorly written content.
In conclusion search engines need to be able to provide searchers with relevant and well-written content for their users and they will reward you with SEO ranking for providing this content. Following these steps, you can clean up your blog and likely see an increase in traffic.
Here are some other post you should check out on SEO:
Using Yoast SEO to Optimize Your WordPress Blog
Why Your Church Can’t Afford to Get SEO Wrong
How to Structure a Perfect SEO Optimized Page [Infographic]
I hope this post was helpful to you!
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