Summary
Our blog is 201 URLs lighter. And it feels great.
The website decluttering process is a marathon: exhausting and energizing, strenuous and therapeutic. We’re working on blog rewrites now, so we still have some miles to go before crossing the finish line. But clearing out the cobwebs of our old content was a glorious first milestone.
If you’re on the fence about cleaning up your old website content, you’ve probably come across 2 camps in your research:
We’re believers (for a host of reasons).
The traditional arguments for removing outdated content are straightforward.
If you have thousands of pages published over several years, you likely have several pages competing for the same keywords and harming each other’s rankings.
Related: Learn more about choosing keywords for SEO results.
Plus, crawl budgets are finite — search engines only have so much processing power to crawl large (10K+ page) websites. Health system websites can easily exceed that limit, which could prevent some pages from being indexed.
Deleting old, underperforming content is better for SEO than hoarding thousands of pages that:
Have you ever found yourself deep in an internet rabbit hole? You poke around a website, click a few links, and land on content that was clearly forgotten about.
Outdated info and broken links abound, and you can bet that it clashes with the brand’s current messaging and design. What an icky user experience.
Just look at this old blog post from 2010. Facebook Places, Foursquare, giant image of an iPhone 3 … This post is more than out-of-date; it’s irrelevant.
It’s common for content to slip through the cracks on large sites. If you can’t remember the last time you took an inventory of your content, you probably have content that you don’t want people to read.
For us at Aha Media, this was about more than SEO and UX. Yes, our website had the common ailments:
We also had a major website redesign coming up, so it was the perfect time to clean up shop (learn why). But those weren’t the reasons why we decided to do something about our old content.
As director of marketing at Aha Media Group, I have personally wanted to declutter for a long time. Many of our old blog posts weren’t sparking joy. They were actually getting in the way of the creative process. I couldn’t mentally move past the clutter.
Fellow members of the Marie Kondo fan club will understand what I mean. Planning content for a cluttered website feels like cooking in a messy kitchen. Sometimes, you need physical space to ideate, experiment, and play. It was finally time to open up that space again.
This was by no means a quick project. Several months of conversations, content strategy work, auditing, writing, and editing went (and are still going) into this.
Not to mention, we kicked off this decluttering project in tandem with the greater redesign. (And I’m glad we did, as each project informed our strategy for the other!)
Here’s how we initiated the decluttering phase of our website makeover:
First, we had to figure out what we were working with. Our blog is over 15 years old, so I knew there would be content we’d forgotten about.
We took an inventory of our blog posts to date, noting:
Next came the tedious (but informative) page-level audits. We evaluated each blog post for:
We wanted to identify underperformers and high achievers. We needed to decide whether to keep, update, merge, or sunset each URL. See the spreadsheet we used below.
How did we decide which content to keep or cut? Generally, we sunsetted blogs that:
We merged blogs with duplicate content and similar keywords. For the rest of the blog posts, we analyzed content quality and SEO best practices to decide whether to keep the content as is, optimize it for SEO, or rewrite it completely.
Steps 1-3 were the first leg of the race. We used that information to delete and redirect 201 blog posts. (Why redirect? So you don’t lose backlinks or traffic from ranking content.)
Right now, as we hit “Publish” on this blog post, we’re knee-deep in the second part of this project: rewriting and optimizing the content that needed another look.
That’s an entirely different process. (Learn about how to rewrite and repurpose old blog posts.)
I know what you’re wondering. “Was all this work worth it just for the peace of mind of a squeaky-clean website?”
Since we’re still working on rewrites, I can’t share the results with you yet. (Look out for them later.) But I can speak about what we’ve gained so far:
Here’s my caveat, healthcare marketer: Website decluttering is best done in conjunction with a larger website initiative, like a redesign or migration.
This process is no walk in the park. It will eat into your time, bandwidth, and budget. It’s easier to justify the investment when you know it’ll impact the ROI of your upcoming redesign. (And it will be all the more worth it.)
This is a daring endeavor, but you must dream big to win big. When you’re ready to declutter your website and make room for new and improved content, we’re here to help.
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Sign up to hear about the official results once we’re done with rewrites and the Google dust settles. (You’ll get helpful content marketing insights along the way, too.)
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AUTHOR
Lacey Reichwald, Director of Marketing
Lacey directs marketing efforts at Aha Media and is strongly committed to delivering impactful content for other marketers. Her diverse background in entrepreneurship, communication, and digital marketing brings a fresh perspective to content strategy for healthcare brands.
