Blog Tip Tuesday: Why You Should Delete 80% of Your Blog Content

If you follow me on Snapchat (un: notanothrblonde) you’ll know that for the past few weeks I’ve been working nonstop on doing a “content audit”. Thanks to the Smart Passive Income podcast by Pat Flynn I found that I could actually increase my blog traffic when I deleted 80% of my blog content. Crazy right? Not really, it actually makes perfect sense…

What is a content audit?

A content audit is when you go through your entire blog database and edit, delete, change, and add blog content. This keeps your pages and posts fresh for Google to crawl across and rank. It also gives you a chance to look back and make sure content from years ago is still on brand and relative to what your blog is today.

Odds are when you started your blog you had no idea about SEO, Google ranking, and internal linking. So, this means all of your content was just a bunch of babbling blog posts with no rhyme or reason. When you conduct a content audit and perhaps delete 80% of your blog content, your blog doesn’t hold any fluff and visitors can browse your archives and know they’ll find good relevant information, which is great for Google and your readers.

Not only can you delete 80% of your blog content, but you can keep what’s left and improve it by removing dead links, adding relevant links, and changing titles/URLs/content to make it a better experience for your users. This includes adding your title keywords throughout the body of your post for SEO purposes and linking internally and externally to similar posts so your link juice is increased.

Why you need a content audit

When I switched to WordPress and changed blog names, I had a lot of posts from 2011-2013 that were off topic and no longer relevant. At the time I was publishing 5 blog posts a week, less than half of which were of any quality. (Quality is always greater than quantity.)

My blog focussed more on inspiration and spirituality and less on fashion, so when I went through all my content, 80% of my blog content turned out to be irrelevant so I deleted it. I went from 400+ posts to 170.

Now you may be thinking, ‘That’s going to kill your Google search ranking!’ Well, not quite…

Since the posts I deleted were about spirituality and zen, keeping them was killing my Google search ranking because the content was unrelated to what my blog is about now: style and self-development. So when people Google “style blog” or “fashion blog” my blog didn’t even rank because the majority of my content was geared toward spirituality. Now that will begin to change since my niche is fashion and blogging/business.

In order to stay relevant and up to date a content audit is not recommended but necessary. If a visitor happens to stumble upon a post from 2013 and the material is out of date guess what… they’re going to be #ontothenextone! Not only that, but it’s an added bonus for you to link articles from years ago to your more recent blog posts, because it will keep people on your page longer and create “link juice”.

You want a positive experience for new visitors no matter what page they land on which means you must conduct a content audit and possibly delete 80% of your blog content. Once you do the initial grunt work it’s easy to maintain. Once a month go in and check your links, SEO, etc. and you’ll be in good shape. You can even recycle old blog content by reviving vintage posts that have been updated, (some examples can be found here, here, and here).

Have you ever deleted 80% of your blog content? If so, how did it impact your traffic? Tell me in the comments below!

xx