Spring Cleaning – Cleaning Up Your Website's Old Content

Submitted by Rachel on Thu, 04/26/2018 - 16:12

Spring has sprung and that means it’s time for some online spring cleaning! Cleaning up your website’s content may seem tedious, but it can make a huge difference for your firm’s performance online. As Google crawls websites, one factor it looks for is up-to-date and relevant information. If your content hasn’t been touched since it was initially published years ago, Google may penalize your firm’s site.

Cleaning up your site isn’t just important for search engine performance--potential claimants want relevant information as well. By updating content you’ll increase your chances of claimants choosing to work with your firm. Here are some quick tips on how to clean up your site’s content:

Where to Start

You’ve decided you want to update your site but can’t figure out where to begin. To start, look through your website’s traffic with Google Analytics. Identify which pages are a priority for updates due to poor performance, such as pages with a high bounce rate, low number of conversions, or low time spent on page.

Identify What Content Needs to be Updated

Accurate content is extremely important, but spring cleaning may be easier than you think. For example, every year the maximum SSDI monthly benefits change. Social Security disability attorneys and advocates will need to keep pages listing maximum SSDI or SSI payments, work credits, and substantial gainful activity up to date each year. As you’re updating content, make a list of what pages have information that changes annually. This way at the start of every new year you will know exactly what pages to revisit for these fast and easy changes, saving you from another mass update.

Avoid Thin Content

Having pages with “thin content,” or a low word count, is never a good idea. Ever since Google’s Panda update in 2011, sites are penalized for thin content. If you find pages that are under preforming have little text, try to find a way to expand upon the information at hand. Keep the content original though; you don’t want to have multiple pages with the same content on them. It will just be another red flag for your site on Google.

For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney discussing comparative negligence, you won’t want to simply state that a claimant cannot file a PI claim if he or she is more than 50% at fault for an auto accident. You should list which states follow the 50% or 51% comparative negligence rule, how a jury will determine who was actually at fault for an auto accident, and how comparative negligence could affect a claimant’s final settlement.

301 Redirect Poor-Performing Pages

After looking at your analytics, you may find some pages that are no longer viable or there is no sense in saving. This could include news articles about Social Security updates in 2016 or COLA for 2014. While these pages are no longer relevant, you shouldn’t delete them simply because a missing page is another “red flag” for Google.

You may have multiple pages with the same type of content and want to merge them into one. If you do have duplicate content, don’t just delete these pages. Instead, redirect traffic from the page to a different URL on the same subject via a 301 redirect.

For example, if you have two pages on the differences between SSDI and SSI, merge the content of the two pages and use a 301 redirect to redirect those going to the underperforming page to better of the two. This tells visitors and Google that the page has moved, plus it ensures that all the content from the redirected page is included in the new page. The idea behind this is that if there are backlinks to your redirected page, deleting the page and creating a broken link will only hurt your SEO.

Monitor Your Changes

You’re not done once you have finished updating your content! Once you have finished your updates, you will want to monitor the pages you’ve updated to make sure the adjustments are doing their job. Over time, if you do not see any increases in traffic, you should go back and take a second look to see if there are any other updates or revisions that could be made. If you have pages that are preforming better after your content updates, comparing those to under-performing pages may help with identifying the original problem and help you come up with tactics to increase traffic to the rest of your site.

With consistent content updates, your organic traffic should increase, making your firm more visible when compared to competitors who never update their websites. Happy cleaning!

Sources Used:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings

https://searchenginejournal.com/why-update-old-content/168489/