Imagine you were a well-crafted piece of content. The blog is your oyster; your content is visible to all.
Then, time passes, new content is released, and you become a little outdated.
“How good a refresh would feel”, you think.
That’s where a blog content audit comes in handy. While I don’t think our individual blog posts have yet gained sentience, it’s a handy thought to consider which of your posts need some extra attention.
Refreshing those posts can often recover traffic and improve SEO performance. The challenge is knowing where to start and what to update.
What Is a Blog Content Audit?
A blog content audit is the process of reviewing existing posts to identify opportunities for SEO improvements, content updates, and technical optimisation. Instead of endlessly producing new articles, an audit helps you strengthen the value of existing content.
An archive of underperforming posts is a strong contributor to the “Do we even need a blog, It’s clearly not working” sentiment. While evergreen content may retain its relevance over time, minor updates here and there can improve rankings and even boost traffic.
Blogs’ strategies are about creating consistent content while optimising where necessary, not just one or the other, which is why, in this post, I’ll be going over a simple audit process that improves content quality, SEO, and UX of older posts.
Identify Posts That Need Updating
Not every post is crying out for attention; some are content with where they are.
That is, you don’t need to update every piece of content. Instead, prioritising underperforming posts is a great starting point and helps you laser-focus your available resources.
Tools like Google Search Console or site SEO plugins can help you identify which posts are falling behind. High impressions but low click-through rate (CTR), or declining traffic over time, can be great metrics to track to help start this process.
Optimising posts that were once ranking but are now struggling, or those covering evergreen topics, can have the greatest impact, especially if these posts have been live for 6 months or more.
Review and Update Your Keywords
It’s not uncommon for earlier posts in your budding business blog career to simply lack necessary keywords.
Perhaps the content creation process wasn’t aligned with SEO back in the day, or the bloggers creating the content weren’t aware that their inclusion was necessary.
As our businesses grow and improve, so do our processes. Additionally, once highly relevant keywords can become less relevant and less used.
With this in mind, review older posts without bias and analyse how impactful each post’s primary keyword still is. Check whether the keyword still has search demand, whether the post currently ranks for it, and whether related terms could strengthen the topic. If it’s no longer relevant, we can reframe the content to include a new keyword.
During this process, explore secondary and alternate long-tail keywords for your posts. Then, use headings and subheadings to incorporate new variations throughout the post.
The result should be the old foundations of the post with a fresh new coat of keywords.
This blog content audit is also the perfect opportunity to pay closer attention to keyword placement and density, ensuring you don’t overoptimise.
Fix Structure and Formatting Issues
I would hazard a guess that your older blog posts don’t resemble your newer ones, especially if your blog has been active for more than a year.
Strict blog format guidelines ensure uniformity throughout a blog’s lifespan. This is crucial if you have more than one person writing for your blog.
Different writing styles and approaches to blogging result in varied formats, which can make your business blog feel disjointed. It can also result in a less-than-favourable user experience for older posts. Fortunately, structuring a blog post for readability and SEO is easy.
When conducting your blog content audit, consider readability.
See some long paragraphs? Break them up.
Long walls of text with no breaks? Add some subheaders.
No main page hierarchy? Capitalise on H2s/H3s.
You can also pay closer attention to scannable formatting, with lists, short paragraphs, questions, and more. It’s easier to identify opportunities for these once the content is already written.
Finally, consider adding missing sections if the content needs it. While this goes beyond simple reformatting, you may feel that a header is missing or that an opportunity to continue a previously mentioned thought is overlooked as you read the content.
Your audit is the perfect opportunity to incorporate this, which will enhance the post’s overall flow and support SEO.
Update Internal Links and CTAs
New blog posts create new opportunities for linking.
Revisiting your older content and re-implementing internal linking is a solid strategy. Audits are also a great time to identify content that could be repurposed into other formats, such as email newsletters or social media posts, which I cover in my guide on repurposing blog content for email and social media. One that is, admittedly, a bit of a pain.
However, if you’re already conducting an audit, you might as well incorporate it into the process.
Adding links to newer posts helps direct users to content they might otherwise miss if they find your site through older posts. You may also have more relevant links to include, now that your blog has a larger scope.
Contrary to my previous point about focusing on underperforming posts, if you have a top-performing older post, you can consider incorporating additional links to underperforming posts to capitalise on its traffic.
When auditing, also ensure that you check your links, especially external ones. Older content is at risk of broken links due to URL changes on external sites, which can negatively impact the user experience.
Finally, consider revamping your call to action to include updated links. If you’ve since reoptimised certain service pages or created relevant new landing pages, link to these instead to enhance the conversion process.
Refresh Media and Optimise for Technical SEO
General technical SEO and image SEO are like two peas in a pod, except one pea is usually overlooked.
For me, that’s usually image SEO.
When auditing, consider replacing outdated images. This may be because the image is no longer relevant, or because you have a better, more up-to-date image to replace it.
When doing so, optimise the following:
- Import it with an optimised file name
- Add alt.text to the image
- Try, where possible, to size the image appropriately to your single post template format
- Convert the image to WebP format, and compress if necessary
This ensures you have small, optimised files that don’t affect page load times.
For the technical component, alt.text and file names are good context cues for search engine crawlers, helping them understand what the image is about and what it contains. This can lead to images ranking in Google Images, for example, increasing visibility.
Finally, double-check your metadata:
- Is your meta title relevant and within 60 characters?
- Is your meta description informative and within the 160-character limit?
- Is your URL slug relevant, contains your keyword, and isn’t over six words?
Your meta title and description can be optimised as you see fit. If you plan to, or have already optimised, a blog post with the points I’ve made so far, you may need to make changes anyway. Adding new sections or changing the primary keyword often requires a shift in page framing.
Your URL slug, however, is a tad more complicated.
Changing this without redirects in mind will immediately harm the SEO of that piece of content, as search engines won’t recognise it as the same post but optimised. Rarely should you change this, especially if the post is performing well.
However, if your post is underperforming and the URL slug is:
-> “refresh-your-old-blog-content-an-seo-focused-audit-guide-for-better-blog-post-results”
You may want to consider changing it. Shorter URL slugs are better for sharing, user experience, and SEO, as they’re easier to understand. Ensure you set up a 301 redirect so that the older URL redirects to the new one.
You can do this manually on your site, or use a tool like Rank Math to automate it once the change is made.
Republish and Reindex Strategically
Finally, once optimisations are in place, we want the fine folks running the search engines to notice that we’re new and updated.
A good practice is to flag in your content that the blog post has been updated. Usually, this is done at the top of the page by adding an editor note, such as:
- Edited on ______ with new content and updated links
You can decide how in-depth you explain the edits. Providing an editor note gives users and search engines clear context that the content has been revised and is up to date.
If sweeping changes have been made to the post so that it barely resembles the older one, you can consider changing the publish date to make it appear as a new post. Just ensure you’re transparent in your editor note about what you’ve changed to justify this.
Once these are done, you’ll want to resubmit the URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure they’re aware that reindexing is needed.
Then, monitor the post in the coming weeks to see the impact on ranking, traffic, and CTR.
Putting a Blog Content Audit Into Action
Now we have the pieces of the optimisation puzzle…
How do we put them together?
When optimising older posts for my clients, I first audit the post as a whole. I’ll make small notes on what’s working, what isn’t, and what I should focus on.
Then I’ll begin optimising the content, keeping everything in mind. When you treat each optimisation point as a step rather than a simple outcome, you’ll find many more opportunities to optimise the content.
For example, considering new links to add can help determine which imagery to change, which headers to add, and how to include supporting keywords, among other things, which can be far more impactful than isolating each step.
If you have old posts gathering dust and don’t know where to start, get in touch. I can help you conduct a comprehensive content audit and refresh your posts for improved performance.
