Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant

Giving your older content an SEO audit

May 22, 2009 Search Engine Optimization, Writing Content

When most people sit down to do SEO on an established site, chances are pretty good that a lot of the content was created simply to add content.  And while some might have been designed with SEO in mind, chances are good - especially on larger sites - that there is a lot of content that is just “there”.  If you have a lot of content that was created before a good SEO strategy was implemented across the site, it is time to go and perform an SEO audit on that content.  Here are some of the things you should be looking at.

Titles
When I look at older content sites, some of the titles are seriously atrocious.  Often times they are either so keyword rich they reek of spam, or they are written with nary a keyword in site, or if you are lucky, one keyword right at the end.   So have a look at each title and see if you can rewrite it to include keywords without being spammy, as well as creating strong titles and will get the clicks.  And yes, I am especially talking to those people who still have content where all their articles have the same “Sitename.com Site Name” title tag

Linking within the content
are there opportunities for you to link to other articles on your site from within each article?  If you can, great.  But be careful not to go overboard, if you have something linked on every sentence, it will look a little odd.

Linking externally
Going back through old content can present opportunities to link to outside authoritative sites within your market area.  Don’t be afraid to link out when those links can provide value to your readers, as well as the possibility of a potential link back from those sites too.

Checking current links
It wouldn’t be the first time someone has discovered that great link you added to an article 3-4 years ago now leads to a porn spam portal.  So be sure to give your current links a health check to make sure none of them are leading to “bad neighborhoods” or other sites you really do not want your readers to think you are endorsing!

Giving new keywords a boost
There are probably new keywords and keyword phrases you have discovered are valuable since you originally wrote some of your content.  See if there are new keywords and phrases that can be worked into content about the topic, so you can give an extra boost to those keywords on your site.  Especially if you aren’t a big writer, this can be a great way to get some of those new keywords without having to write entirely new content.

Related posts
If your older content is on a Wordpress blog, there are many different “related posts” plugins you can use.  Otherwise, start with your most viewed articles and eventually work your way so that every article on your site has related posts or articles listen at the end.  It will not only help with deep linking but it will also be great for user experience and increase page views on your site as well.

Fix typos
I am quite certain I have pages out there with typos, and every once in a while I will spend some time going through old articles and checking for spelling errors and typos.  While once upon a time typos and misspellings could be considered a viable SEO strategy, nowadays - particularly with Google’s new “did you mean” correction in the search results - it won’t pay off as well now as it once did.  And it doesn’t hurt to check grammar while you are at it too.

Outdated content
If you have content that is outdated, take the time to update it, especially if new information arises… you want people who are looking for that new information to be able to find it, especially if you aren’t planning to write a new article about it for your site.  That way when people search for it, you will have it, whether they search through a search engine or your internal site search.

So next time you have a couple hours to spare, sit down and start looking at your older content and see how you can give them an SEO audit and fix what needs fixing.  Just be sure to keep track of which pages you have done, so that next time you sit down, you won’t have to try and remember what you have done and what still is awaiting the SEO audit.

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