Content maintenance for SEO: research, merge & redirect

As your site grows, you’ll have more and more posts. Some of these posts are going to be about a similar topic. Even if you’ve always categorized it well, your content might be competing with itself. At the same time, some of your articles might get out of date, and not be entirely correct anymore. To prevent all of this, you need to perform content maintenance.

Following are some steps about SEO Content maintenance that our company provides

1) Audit your content

The first step in our company process was finding all the content we had around keyword research. Now, most of that was simple: we have a keyword research tag, and most of the content was nicely tagged.

A site: search in Google gave me the missing articles that Google considered to be about keyword research. I simply searched for site:yoast.com “keyword research” and Google gave me all the posts and pages on the site that mentioned the topic.

The reason our SEO expert team started auditing the content for this particular group of keywords is simple: Our Best SEO team wanted to improve website rankings around the cluster of keywords around keyword research. So I needed to analyze which of these pages were ranking, and which weren’t.

2) Analyze the content performance

• We went into Google Search Console (the new beta) and went to the Performance section. In that section, I clicked on the filter bar.
• I clicked Query and then typed “keyword research” into the box.
• This makes Google Search Console match all queries that contain the words keyword and research. This gives you two very important pieces of data.
• A list of the keywords your site had been shown in the search results for and the clicks and click-through rate (CTR) for those keywords.
• A list of the pages that were receiving all that traffic and how much traffic each of those pages received.

3)Decision time

As I went through each post in this content maintenance process, I decided what we were going to do: keep it, or delete it. If I decided we should delete it (which I did for the majority of the posts), I decided to which post we should redirect it. The more basic posts I decided to redirect to our SEO for Beginners post: what is keyword research?. The posts about keyword research tools were redirected to our article that helps you select (and understand the value of) a keyword research tool.

4)Take action

Now it was time to take action! I had a list of action items: content to add to specific articles after which each of the articles that piece of content came from could be deleted. Using Yoast SEO Premium, it’s easy to 301 redirect a post or page when you delete it, so that process was fairly painless.

5)Content maintenance is hard work

If you’re thinking: “that’s a lot of work”. Yes, it is. And we don’t write about just keyword research, so this is a process we have to do for quite a few terms, multiple times a year. This is a very repeatable content maintenance strategy though:

• Audit, so you know which content you have;
• Analyze, so you know how the content performs,
• Decide which content to keep and what to throw away
• To know detail about SEO please click here.