Tuesday, October 23rd I attended a Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE ) event in Newton, Massachusetts. It was hosted by and held at TechTarget.
The presentation titled “Increasing Traffic with Content Consolidation and Clean Ups” was given by Rhea Drysdale of Outspoken Media.
It’s a timely topic since many people have been writing in their blogs for ten years or longer. They now have aged blog posts. Old blog posts end up with broken links and outdated information. Broken links happen easily:
- Linked-to web pages no longer exist or get moved in the website and their addresses change.
- Authors of blog posts leave to work for another company. Links to their bios become obsolete.
- The person who left a comment no longer has the same email address.
Ms. Drysdale talked about MISSED opportunities and LOST opportunities with regard to the content on your pages, posts, and articles. Once you determine whether you have a missed opportunity or a lost opportunity you follow a course of action to remedy the miss or loss; but – each one has its own course of action.
Ms. Drysdale talked about when to perform content audits and competitive gap analysis. She gave examples of each and led us along a high-level process to conclude/create strategies to propose to our clients based on the findings of each of those.
Take aways:
- Reputation is gaining importance, and, Google is devising new ways to substantiate reputation
- YMYL websites/pages held to higher standards than the rest. “…any page including content that can affect someone’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability is a YMYL page”…
- Do content pruning
- Re-read Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines
- Get familiar with Google Natural Language evaluator.
—- Ran it this morning against my WordPress Upgrades Package page. Here’s the first page of results. (Click to see up close.)
I’ll need to study up on the information that is provided – the cloud, the sentiment, the syntax, and the categories - Pay attention to the Topic Cluster Model -Useful for presenting information in a new, refreshing way. Pillar articles linking to topic cluster.
- Read Kristina Halvorson’s book on Content Strategy
More tools:
- Broken Links tool (Xenu)
- Content King (crawler)
- Google Data Studio
- G2Crowd – Software and Services Review
- SpyFU – Competitive Analysis
Why did this presentation have meaning for me?
It is important to me that when consulting with clients, I am armed with the most recent information and industry trends. No matter which WordPress service we began our relationship with, we often come around to strategizing about how to blog at a consistent pace and how to consistently find topics of interest to their target audiences.
Most recently – and probably because several have been blogging for many years now – our strategy discussions revolve around aged content. We are strategizing about what to do with that old content – AND – The toughest hurdle seems to be, “How do we refresh old content without impacting our SEO rank?”
Ms. Drysdale introduced some new approaches and strategies (to me) on how to handle that. I have greater clarity and wonderful new information to add to my arsenal.