6 Tips for a Cleaner Website • Yoast

If you’ve been working on your website for a few years, there’s a good chance your site has become a huge collection of posts and pages. As you write a post, you may realize that you have already written a similar article (maybe even twice), or you may feel like you have written something similar that you can no longer find. This can become even more complex if you are not the only one writing for this website. Cleaning up your older content can be overwhelming; Therefore, regular content maintenance is crucial. In this post we will give you some tips for creating a good content maintenance strategy!

1. Take time to curate content

Especially if you enjoy writing, it might be tempting to keep producing new content and never look back. But if you do that, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. Your articles that are very similar to each other can compete with each other in search results. Too much content that is not structured can also confuse website visitors. They may not know where to go on your website. And the more content you receive, the more work it will take to clean up your content. So don’t wait too long to implement a suitable content maintenance strategy.

It’s a good idea to schedule regular SEO audits and set aside some time for content cleanup. How often you should do this depends on a few factors, such as: B. the amount of content you already have, how often you publish new articles, and how many people you have on your editorial team.

At Yoast, we try to plan structured sessions with our content team to improve existing content. We make lists or do an audit (more on that later) and start cleaning up. But in addition to these sessions, we also improve and update blog content in our usual publishing flow. When we come across articles that need updating, we add them to our backlog, assign them to a team member, and update or even republish them to our blog.

2. What does the data say?

When you sit down to actually go through and clean up your content, it makes sense to base your decisions on data. In addition to looking at the content of the page itself, you should answer the following questions:

• Is the site getting traffic?
• Does it have value (meaning the visitor completed one of your goals during the same session on your website)?
• How is the engagement?
• How long do people stay on this page?

This type of data can all be found in Google Analytics. If you go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens in the left menu, you’ll get a nice overview of the traffic on your pages. You can even export this to a spreadsheet to keep track of what you’ve done or decided on a page.

If you want to know how your articles are performing in search results, Google Search Console is a great help. The “Performance” tab in particular tells you a lot about how your pages are performing on Google. It shows you the average position you occupy for a keyword, but also how many impressions and clicks your pages receive. Check out our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console.

There are a number of tools that simplify this process by providing a list of your content and how it is performing. This makes it easier to compare the rank of specific (related) articles and get their traffic. A tool we like to use at Yoast is this Ahrefs content review template. This will give you insights into what content is still of value to your site and what low-quality content is dragging you down. You will receive advice per URL (like leave/check manually/redirect or update/delete). Of course, we wouldn’t recommend blindly following such automated advice, but it will give you a lot of insight and is a good starting point for thinking critically about your content.

3. Always keep an eye on your most important content

While it’s not harmful if some older posts escape your attention while you’re working on new content, there are posts and pages that you always need to keep an eye on. You’re probably already monitoring pages that convert, whether it’s related to sales, newsletter subscriptions, or a contact or reservations page. Or you may have pages that are doing (or could be) doing really well in the search engines. For example, some always current, complete and informative posts or pages on topics in which you are really an expert. This is the content that you want to keep fresh, relevant and link to regularly. These are the posts and pages that should rank high in search results.

In Yoast SEO Premium, you can mark these types of guides as cornerstone content. This triggers some specific actions in Yoast SEO. For example, if you haven’t updated a Cornerstone post in six months, it will be added to the Cornerstone outdated content filter. You will find this filter in your post overview. It helps you stay on top of your SEO by telling you if important content needs updating. Ideally, your score there should be zero. If you find some articles in this filter, it’s time to check them out. Make sure all the information is still correct, add new insights, and perhaps check competitors’ posts on the same topic to see if you haven’t missed anything.

4. Improve your internal linking

A content curation activity that is often greatly underestimated is working on your internal linking. Why invest time in internal linking? Well, primarily because the content you link to is of interest to your readers and helps you keep them on your site. But these links help search engines like Google crawl your content and determine its importance. An article that receives many links (internal or external) is considered important by Google. It also helps Google understand which content is related to each other. Therefore, internal linking is an important part of a cornerstone content strategy. All of your sites, but especially the evergreen guides discussed above, need attention, regular updates, and lots of links!

Therefore, it is good to link to your other posts when creating a new post. The internal linking suggestion tool in Yoast SEO Premium makes this easy for you. Although it is quite common to link to existing content in our new articles, remember that these new articles also need links pointing to them. At Yoast, we regularly check whether there are enough links pointing to our new posts, especially if we want them to rank!

Implementation of a cornerstone strategy

But what about the basic content we discussed above? How do you ensure your most valuable content gets enough links? If you want to focus on these articles, Yoast SEO Premium has just the right tool for you: the Cornerstone workout. In just a few steps you can select your most important items and mark them as cornerstones. You will then be shown how many internal links point to this post. Do you think this doesn’t correspond to the number of links it should have? We’ll give you suggestions on which related posts you can link to. And with just a few clicks you can add the link in the right place in the corresponding post:

Since you probably (hopefully!) don’t change your basic strategy every month, it’s not necessary to do this training every month. If you have a large amount of content that is performing quite well, you should get this sorted, say every three or six months. However, if you’re just starting out, publishing a lot of new content, or making big changes to your website, you should probably do this training more often. As your website grows, your focus may change. This training will help you ensure you stay focused on the content you really want to assess.

5. Clean out the attic every now and then

So far we’ve mostly discussed your best and most important content. But on the other side of the spectrum, we have your older (and lonelier) content that you haven’t touched in a while. Announcements of events that happened years ago, new product launches from when you were just starting out, and blog posts that are simply no longer relevant. These posts keep filling up your attic, and at some point you should give your attic a thorough cleaning. You don’t want users or Google to find and get lost on poor quality pages or pages with outdated or irrelevant information.

There are a few ways to achieve this. Of course, you can also go into your blog post archive and clean it up while going through your oldest post. However, never just delete anything! Take a closer look at the content and always check whether a post is still receiving traffic in Google Analytics. Do you doubt whether you should keep it? Read our blog on updating or deleting old content to help you make this decision. And if you think a post is irrelevant and you want to delete it, you should either redirect it to a good, equivalent URL or display a 410 page indicating that it was intentionally deleted. You can read everything about properly deleting a post here.

Clean up orphaned content

Yoast SEO Premium also has an SEO workout to help you curate old and forgotten content: the Orphan Content Workout. It lists all your unlinked content for you. Since you have never or hardly linked to these pages, we can assume that these are pages that you created once but never looked at again. Or they no longer fit into your current content strategy. That’s why this is a good place to start cleaning up! With the training you can go through the posts and pages one by one and think: Is this post no longer relevant? Then delete the URL and redirect it to a better destination in a few clicks! Is it still relevant but outdated? Then update it and start adding links to related posts. Did you just forget to link to this post? Then start adding some links! The training walks you through all of these steps so you can easily track your progress.

How often should you do this training? It’s difficult to generalize because it depends heavily on how much old content you have, how good your internal linking is, and how much new content you create. If you have a larger website, it will probably be quite a time investment when you first build it. But if you stick with it and do this training regularly, for example monthly, you will get there faster every time!

6. Review your content per topic/day

If you have a lot of similar articles, they can compete with each other in the search engines. We call this content or keyword cannibalization. That’s why it’s good to take a look at all the articles on a particular topic from time to time. Are they different enough? Are they right below each other on page 2 in Google search results? Then you may need to merge two articles into one to improve the performance of that article. Depending on the size of your site, you may look at this at a category or tag level, or even smaller subtopics.

In the above post, we describe in detail how to perform this content curation process to fix keyword cannibalization. In short, you need to create an overview of the posts on this topic. Then see how all of these articles work using Google Search Console and Google Analytics. This will help you decide what to keep, merge or delete!

Content maintenance: You need time and tools!

As you may have already noticed, maintaining content can be quite a task. But if you do it regularly and use the right tools, it will get easier over time. And the easier it gets, the more fun! Who doesn’t want a tidy website? It will make you, your website visitors and Google very happy. So don’t wait too long to implement a good content maintenance strategy and use the right tools to make your life easier!

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