You really should clean your blog posts up every quarter, but many of us just don’t do it.
Since quarter 4 is super busy for many bloggers and influencers out there, I wanted to share some tips to help you with the end of year blog post cleanup. You can also plan to do this task in Quarter 1 of the New Year, if you’re already super duper busy in this quarter.
The easiest way to clean up your blog every year is to use Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools). I’m going to share how I clean up my blog posts during the year when I have a few hours free.
Example of Doing Blog Post Cleanup Manually
I first create a post-it note list with the years and months. This way I can keep a running checklist of which years and months I’ve gone through.
This is how I review every single blog post on my blogs. I go into my WP Dashboard, click on All Posts, then filter by oldest date.
As shown above, I only have 2 blog posts published in April 2016. The next step is to open each blog post in a new tab. Take the URL of the blog post and place it into your Search Console to check performance.
How to Check Performance in Search Console for a Blog Post
You log into your Google Search Console, click on Performance, then I change the date range to last 12 months, click on +New button, and select “page”.
Now that you’ve clicked “page” you can copy and paste the blog post URL into the box. For this, I’m going to show you how I reviewed a blog post, Life is Unpredictable, that’s getting a lot of impressions but not-so-many clicks.
As you can see above this blog post has received 21 total clicks in the last 12 months, show up 12,000 times in search results, and is showing up in page 1-2 in search results (1.8).
Well, that’s pretty hopeful. This means I will not remove this blog post, as it’s showing up and getting some clicks. Instead, I’ll copy the data from the above screenshot into my own Excel spreadsheet to work on updating it when I have a moment of free time.
Having the information for each blog post that I plan to update so that I can increase the clicks helps me to have an organized to-do list for blog post cleanup.
This also serves as a way to evaluate the clicks and impressions as I continue to achieve success with SEO’ing this mess of a blog I have.
Example Blog Cleanup
Brandy Ellen Writes is a blog that has been used for a variety of things over the years. Brandy originally had the domain for her business portfolio and services as a virtual assistant. Later, she started using it as a lifestyle blog after selling HappilyBlended.com.
She switched gears and started focusing on SEOing the website. She spends about one hour per week trying to evaluate what’s bringing traffic to the blog. This helps her stay on track with what works and doesn’t work with the audience that’s drawn to this blog.
Continuing to Clean Up Old Blog Posts
All I do is repeat the above process for every blog post, starting with the oldest blog content first. If I see a blog post that hasn’t received any clicks in the last 12 months? I either delete it or re-write it into a better article.
If you do delete any blog posts from your blog, I highly suggest you have some sort of redirect plugin in place.
I used to use a plugin called Redirection. It’s free and you can search it up under Plugins, Add New, type Redirection in the search box, and voila, it’s the first redirection plugin that shows up. Now, if you have Yoast SEO – Premium, I *believe* that plugin can do this redirection stuff for you, too!
Some Advice on Blog Post Cleanup
There’s another way I go about working on old blog post cleanup and SEOing older content.
If we have a holiday coming, such as Valentine’s Day and I have content for that holiday I’ll go ahead and review the content for that holiday.
As you can see above, an older Valentine’s Day blog post did get 1 click out of 4 impressions. That’s not too shabby!
Here’s a better screenshot of the data for this Valentine’s Day Blog Post as of today … with just the small changes I made on 12/9/2020 it seems I increased clicks from 1 to 9!! Every little bit helps 😉
What I do is copy the data over as shown in my above instructions, and then I go into that blog post to make updates. I make a note in the spreadsheet of what date I updated the content and what I did.
For this Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Staff blog post:
- I used my AzonPress Affiliate Plugin for Amazon links to add updated products and gift ideas.
- I changed the title (not the URL) to be more SEO friendly.
- Updated the text to reflect the keywords shown in the screenshot below.
- Added the FAQ Structured Content Section.
I will go back into this spreadsheet to check the data on my blog posts to see if my changes have helped them show up in search results, get more clicks, or get more impressions.
I think I will check each URL that I updated every 2-3 months, as that gives the search engines plenty of time to update my changes on their end.
I’ll then evaluate the data again to determine if I can make any other SEO adjustments to help give it an extra shove to the top of search results.
How do you republish old blog posts?
If you’re planning on republishing old blog posts, so that they show up on your home page and go out into your RSS feed again then you’ll just copy the old content, add it into a new blog post, publish the new blog post using the SAME URL as the old blog post and delete the old blog post. Be sure to update the content and optimize it for SEO.
How do you optimize blog posts?
While going back and optimizing old blog posts as you learn more about blogging and SEO is important, it’s always best to optimize blog posts from the onset. You’ll want to create a checklist of things to do with every new post such as; headers, FAQs with answers, personal experiences, and tips all including your relevant keywords.
Should I date my blog posts?
You shouldn’t have the date show up in blog posts, as this can get tricky when you republish old blog posts. It’s fine to have the date show up on the top of a blog post, but never include the date in your permalink of an individual blog post. This helps push better rank with search engines, too!
