Feb 26, 2024

Outdated content: how to find and refresh it

The default set of page collections in Ottimo

The challenge

There’s a lot of awesome content on the company blog – but there’s also a ton of outdated material.

These old posts are growing more irrelevant and distracting with every passing day. Each piece is a missed opportunity, a drag on overall site performance, and a bad representation of the brand.

Further compounding the problem: the content library is huge. It’s hard to know where to begin with these content updates.

Jason Narog has a way to do this while still showing measurable improvement in the meantime.

(Jason is the Webmaster at Fountain.)

The play

Leverage the pages on the site that are performing slightly below their potential. They’ve got some momentum, so are likely to show improvement sooner than pieces that have no traction at all.

Once we find those strategic pieces, send them to the writing staff with directions to make the piece evergreen.

“We're using performance data from Ottimo combined with Ercule best practices. We take the URL, copy and paste that into the checklist, and add a little bit of information about what needs to be done.” – Jason Narog

everygreen content template seo update png

The strategy

“I use the app as my initial homework assignment to then figure out what content we should target. It's my initial point of investigation.” – Jason Narog

Jason’s first step: check out the Wallflower and Sloth buckets in Ottimo.

Wallflowers are lagging a bit in search performance.

evergreen content ottimo wallflowers guide png

Sloths are lagging a bit in engagement metrics.

evergreen content ottimo sloths png

Jason starts by pulling the top 3 from each group.

He looks at each page individually to assess any room for potential. He vets the pages for quality to figure out which ones can be reasonably improved and how the approach can be updated.

“If it looks like something we can actually turn into an evergreen piece of content? Or is it something we can update for this year?  Like a Top 10 list from two years ago: can we now make it relevant this year?” – Jason Narog

With that list of content and a few notes about how to fix it, he sends the assignment over to his writing team – along with a simple checklist for SEO.

evergreen content template seo checklist png

The perks

Jason has found a clear way into an otherwise messy content library.

evergreen content ottimo dashboard png

It streamlines his management workflow and performance:

  • Repeatable update process
  • Eliminating expired content
  • Measurable performance improvements for existing content
  • More evergreen content
  • Clear guidance for writers

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