Do you own or manage a website? There are times when circumstances, such as migration or site optimization strategy, require you to re-sort your old web content to determine whether it is still relevant or not. You’ll have to decide whether to delete or update stuff.
It’s likely that you think deleting contents is a little perplexing. You made an effort to write it well, and it’s possible that the content will be useful to website visitors. However, it’s also possible that the content should be removed because it’s no longer relevant. You need to reassess the goals of that content before eliminating or changing it.
Some content may not require removal. Instead, you can update it to make it more relevant to your target audience and current trends. So, how do you know if a piece of web content has to be updated or removed? Continue reading to find out the answer!
1. Don’t Delete All Your Old Web Content!
It’s possible that some of your content is still relevant to your website goals and target audience, so it’s worth keeping with a few tweaks for website optimization. So, what are the things you must take into account before deleting content?
a. Web Content Benefits
Analyze the merits of the web content to your target audience. If your audience still benefits from the information, you may want to just update it to keep up with the times.
b. Web Content Contribution
Evaluate the web’s contribution to your website traffic organically. If the content contains a large number of backlinks, you should not delete it. If you delete it, there’s a chance you’ll lose conversions from those backlinks.
c. Web Content Performance
Content that performs poorly, such as not delivering organic traffic to the website or having few backlinks, is no longer relevant and should be removed. This can truly help your website in terms of SEO strategy using the EAT formula.
2. What You Need to Do When Analyzing Content
When it comes to content analysis, there are a few things you must accomplish technically. If you do this, you will be able to better understand the performance of your web content. This will make determining whether a content should be removed or updated much easier.
a. Website Crawling
Indexing, also known as website crawling, is an activity aimed at swiftly obtaining a list of URL databases. This website crawling not only collects a list of URLs, but it also helps you to analyze a website for SEO. It aids in the discovery of material, web modifications, and broken links, among other things.
Additional tools are required for the crawling process to run swiftly and effectively. For example, Googlebot, HTTrack, Cyotek Webcopy, Webhose, and other programs are among the options. You will be able to export the URL database to a spreadsheet using these tools.
b. Finding Backlinks To Your Website
To find and analyze backlinks pointing to your website, you can use tools from Ahrefs or Ubersuggest. With Ubersuggest, you can find the SEO Explorer menu. Whereas with Ahrefs, you can find the Ahrefs Site Explorer.
These tools assist you in determining whether pages on your site have backlinks and analyzing them. Thus, analyzing backlinks to any particular page will make it easier for you to figure out which content performs better.
c. Analyzing Website Traffic Data of the Last Year
Then, using Google Analytics, you can look up your website’s traffic data for the previous year. For website traffic analysis, a year is the best time frame. If the website is small or has limited traffic, you can add a period of more than a year to make the analysis more accurate.
To do so, you need to go to Google Analytics and pick Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages from the drop-down menu. Then, you can set the source to organic traffic and the timeframe to one year. To make it easier to study the data later, you can export it to a spreadsheet.
d. Indexing And Matching The Data You Get
You’ve already utilized the preceding tools, Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. The next step is to index and match as much data as possible. Index matching can be done using data from all of the tools mentioned above.
Backlinks, sessions, bounce rates, and conversions are the statistics you’ll need to match. This will make it easy for you to find vital information about your contents, such as whether or not a page has backlinks and whether or not a page has a high or low bounce rate.
e. Analyzing Every Page
After indexing the data, you may determine which content that you are still publishing, content that can be merged, and content that should be removed. Contents with a high level of performance, such as backlinks, conversions, and traffic, should be retained or updated.
3. Tips for Updating Web Content Well
You now have a list of which web contents you should maintain and update, as well as which ones you should eliminate. Let’s look at some tips for correctly upgrading web contents to improve your website and readership.
a. Avoiding Changing Links
You must change the permalinks of your pages as little as possible. Because these links are a mechanism that search engines employ to index online material and attribute value, they should be avoided. If there are other web pages that use your content as a backlink, changing the link may result in a 404 error.
b. Giving Additional Notes
To avoid being confused, you might add additional footnotes to the changed web content for website visitors’ awareness. For instance, “this article was first published on xxx, and has been updated with more current information on xxx”.
c. Combining Web Content
If a piece of content has low traffic but is still relevant, and another piece on the same topic has high traffic, you can merge the two. This trick can help you improve the quality of your material. When you’re combining materials, choose the one whose content works best as a published page.
d. Making Content More Useful
Content that is helpful to the audience is one technique to optimize your website. If you conduct a content analysis, you may discover that the content you prepared is outdated and no longer relevant. Thus, you should update it by adding to the article’s material. If there are any typos, you need to double-check them. To make sentences more readable, you should condense them. You need to pay attention to trends in your target audience to create more interactive content.
Those are a few points to consider when deciding whether to delete or maintain your old web contents. Basically, depending on the objective of your website and who your target audience is, you’ll need to decide carefully. As a result, you can create content that is consistent and relevant to your audience’s demands, and your website’s performance will improve accordingly.
Read also: Tips Membuat Konten Yang Menarik Audiens
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