Blog Posts, Not Clog Posts: Content That Doesn't Take Up Space in Your Marketing Pipeline

Questions to Begin Your Blog Analysis

Just because your content was relevant and optimized when you published it doesn’t mean it’s doing you any favors now. In fact, it could be hurting your search presence. To determine if it needs an overhaul, ask yourself these five questions:

1. Am I Answering Users’ Questions?

These days, your blog posts should answer a specific question. Posts should be long enough to answer a search query completely, and without being boring—because user experience still matters, and always will. Remove posts that are full of "fluff" or so generic that Google's AI Overview is doing a better job.

Search engines such as Google now prioritize “ending a user’s journey” over other SEO practices that may have been more prevalent at the time of an older post’s publication. This means if a user opens your post, reads it and then returns to search results to click on another article, Big Brother Google will take notice and assume your content wasn’t a sufficient answer to the question. Rather than “How to Increase Event Attendance,” consider “How to Deal with the LA Flake: Attracting Event Attendees in Los Angeles.” The latter provides actionable steps and answers using current, regional language (e.g. “flake”) while being geographically specific.

2. Is My Blog Optimized?

Look through your blog with a digital marketer’s lens and make sure your posts are properly optimized. The meta data should be accurate. The titles should be descriptive and accurate. The blog description should entice the reader to read further. The posts must be marked with the right categories and tags. Especially in a market where there is stiff competition, every little technical detail matters.

Another thing to check is alt text. Also called image alt tags, alt text is a phrase or sentence that describes the contents of an image. It’s incredibly important for two reasons. First, accessibility regulations like WCAG and ADA legally require sites to meet requirements for users with visual impairments. Second, alt text makes your blog findable not only in web searches but in image searches as well.

3. Can AI Understand My Posts?

AI is not your audience, but as GEO becomes more and more widespread, your posts need to be "readable" by AI. Hierarchical headings and "helper text" ensure the flow of ideas and information is legible to the algorithm. If your blog content isn’t friendly to your neighborhood algorithm and your competitor’s content is, then you’re going to be left in their AI dust.

As a word of caution, beware of making your blog posts boring. You have to strike a balance between informative and engaging. Make sure your posts still have personality and a clear voice that speaks to the human experience, while containing the right headers and text to rank well in increasingly AI-driven search engines. Writing for the new age of generative search is a skill that will allow brands to scale.

4. Do My Posts Cannibalize One Another?

Repurposing content is smart. Content cannibalization is less so. Cannibalization is when your posts start competing in search rankings with each other. With an older blog that has had multiple authors, this can happen if you (unknowingly) revisit a topic a few years later without removing or revising the original.

Revisiting topics is a good thing, but you are often better off deleting the outdated content, so long as the old content isn’t still providing SEO value. Check for heavy overlaps, too. It's fine to touch on a few of the same points here and there, but if the Venn diagram of content starts to look like a circle, you run the risk of cannibalization.

5. Is My Content (Still) Accurate and Relevant?

Our last and most obvious tip is to ensure your blog posts are still accurate and relevant. Has a scientific development or product change rendered a post obsolete? Does a post use a cultural reference or analogy that would make younger audiences scratch their heads? Did you use to end posts with “please follow us on Google+?” (Too soon?)

A key part of a blog audit is checking links. External links break all the time, but even internal links can snap when you move or replace a piece of content elsewhere. You can use software to test link validity to avoid checking them manually. The trouble, though, is that even valid, live links can lead to outdated and inaccurate information, so you do need to have a human in the loop on your link-checking process.

Pro tip: check your content management system (CMS) to see if you can set blog posts to hide after a few years!

An Agency to Audit Your Blog Content

When your pipes are clogged, you get a drain auger. When your content is clogged, you get a blog audit. If you have an old blog and need support to assess its efficacy, call our experts. We have the software, team and time to go through your old posts and fix what’s causing problems with your blog’s health. Let’s free up the blockages in your marketing pipeline today!