What's more valuable: new content or optimizing old content
-
We are a niche legacy print publication that's been around for close to 20 years. Recently, we combined several old sites in one new responsive site. We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed. Most of the old pieces although published, have not been optimized for SEO. However, as we create new pieces, we optimize them for search and social and they tend to get more organic traffic.
Where we're torn is on how much we should balance our limited editorial resources between cleaning up and optimizing our extensive archive to improve our organic reach, vs. pumping out new original pieces each week.
I realize that without a lot of data the answers will be varied - I guess I'm looking for a best practices approach for content publishers.
If it helps at all, our main conversion goal is selling subscriptions to our print and digital publications. We know that organic traffic tends to be more engaged than our social referrals. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the magazine fulfilment business, it's tough to know which channels convert better.
Thanks!
-
Hey there
Moz actually has a great step by step guide to help you with deciding what content can be updated, removed, or consolidated. You can read more about that here.
It covers everything from traffic, relevancy, shares, linking and categorization and more. Super comprehensive.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed.
salivatin'
If these are unique, evergreen articles, I would be attacking that as fast as possible. I would divert staff with appropriate talent away from other jobs. They would clean these up, any that are evergreen and could be displayed as content unseen by current readers would be republished and displayed in my normal content stream. All others would be built into the category and internal linkage format of the website. The faster you get them up the faster then will be pulling in traffic. I would do them slowly enough to do a great job but otherwise as quickly as possible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Strange "?offset" URL found with content crawl issues
I recently recieved a slew of content crawl issues via Moz for URL's that I have never seen before For example:
Moz Pro | | HannahPalamara
Standard URL: https://skilldirector.com/news,
Newly identified URL: https://skilldirector.com/news?offset=1469542207800&category=Competency+Management). Does anyone know where the URL comes from and how to fix it?0 -
How can I limit the impact of Google's mobile friendly updates on keyword rankings?
Hi everyone, I have a client on a monthly SEO package that is taking a hard hit in the rankings as their website is not mobile friendly. We are currently building a new website for them that will be fully responsive, but face the predicament of how to keep the current site performing relatively well in the rankings in the meantime. The site is generally well optimised and we always follow SEO best practices, so we've hit a bit of a stumbling block as to how to limit any negative impact the mobile friendly updates have on the site. Does anyone have any suggestions for damage limitation? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | keyzo0 -
Root domain or 'www' subdomain for campaigns?
I am setting up a campaign and I am unsure whether I should specify the root domain (prohibitionhats.co.nz) or the 'www' subdomain (www.prohibitionhats.co.nz). Are there any guidelines for this or will Moz automatically aggregate the data for both irrespective of the domain you choose? Thanks Laurie
Moz Pro | | turnbullholdingsltd0 -
Adding new categories to my website and getting them ranked
Hi, I currently run a website and have added a couple of new categories lately. The website is Planes Trains Automobiles Co UK. For example I want to add "Planes for sale" as a new category. What is the best way to go about this? Will each aircraft added add content therefore ranking? I don't want to approach an SEO company yet as the service would be free for the time being? Thanks
Moz Pro | | PlanesTrainsAutos0 -
Find New Keywords Tool - Information is not accurate
When using the Find New Keywords tool, the information listed for Rank is often incorrect. I attached an image with two screen shots. One from the Find New Keywords Tool and the other is a Google search results page. In Incognito mode, I searched for the third item on the list, "Speak Creative Memphis." The results put us at #1 for that term, but the Keyword Tool shows that we're #4. Can you help me understand why there is a difference? keywordtool-ss.jpg
Moz Pro | | speakcreative1 -
Duplicate Content being caused by home page?
Hello everyone, I am new to SEOmoz and SEO in general and I have a quick questions. When running a SEO Web Crawler report on my URL, I noticed in the report that my home page (also known as my index page) was listed twice. Here is what the report was showing: www.example.com/ www.example.com/index.php So are these 2 different urls? If so, is this considered duplicate content and should I block crawler access to the index.php? Thanks in advance for the help!
Moz Pro | | threebiz0 -
How long do old links stay in Open SIte Explorer stats?
Hi, In Open Site Explorer has around 2000 External followed links which would be great if it was true. I think the issue is that before my site wasn't appending slashes to the url so I think it was counting links from http://mydomain/page1 to http://mydomain/page2/ as an external link (could be wrong here). I corrected this a couple of months ago but I still seem to have over 2000 External links. When I look at the linking pages many of them are "sans slash" and have old anchor text in the link. How long does it take of OSE to update these stale links it there any way I can prompt it to take aciton?
Moz Pro | | moesian0