Questions for SEO team:
What to do with older blogs:
Q. Can old blogs with little or no traffic be affecting the traffic on the blog?
A. Older blogs with little or no traffic are likely not affecting the traffic on the blog but are an opportunity to redirect to the most up-to-date version of the blog or blog topic.
Q. How should we decide whether to redirect or delete old blogs — or leave them alone? For instance, should we review the oldest blogs (from 2008) first and use certain parameters — such as a minimum number of pageviews within a given timeframe, how outdated the content is, whether it’s possible to update the content, if we have a similar, newer blog to which we can redirect?
A. With old blogs that are outdated and have low traffic but have a relevant topic still, it would be beneficial to redirect the old blog pages to the newest blog that focuses on that topic. This preserves any bookmarks, residual traffic, and link juice from those links.
If the post is old but still receiving decent traffic, then updating the content would be best for increasing rankings and providing relevant, up-to-date content to our audience.
An example already shared with the Blog team - https://www.nurse.com/blog/how-do-i-become-a-certified-clinical-documentation-specialist/. This post is old (from 2010) but has seen a significant increase in traffic in 2023, about a 400% increase in landing page views. In 2022 (January 1 – July 25), Organic had 144 landing page views; this year, there have been 1,462 organic page views. This page has a good opportunity to update content to be more relevant and increase organic rankings.
Q. Do you recommend a cut-off date for how old a blog can be before we take it down or redirect? For instance, should we delete or redirect anything before 2014?
A. For a cutoff date, any information that is more than 3 years old is subject to review to see whether the information is still relevant and needs to be updated or redirected (to a current relevant page).
With the last Blog review, we removed many of the old duplicate pages, and I believe we also removed and redirected a lot of low-quality and poor-performing blog posts.
Other SEO questions:
Q. How does readability impact traffic?
A. https://yoast.com/does-readability-rank/
In summary, Google crawls a page and attempts to read the content as a human would, so keyword stuffing and similar tactics are a thing of the past.
Readability is crucial to ranking well, as all search engines are working towards having more intelligent crawlers that can understand the intent behind each page better as a human would.
Q. Which keywords are we “owning” or doing well with? Is there an audit or data pull that we can review that provides this info?
A. We can pull our priority keyword list as well as what we are currently ranking for on a monthly basis if this would be helpful! We are also happy to have Ahrefs send an automated keyword report every month.
Automated report preferred
Q. In WordPress we have the option to add keyphrase synonyms or related keyphrases.” Which, if either, is better for SEO/pageviews?
A. While these items are a WordPress Yoast feature to help improve the readability of an article, which in turn reflects positively in search rankings, these are not direct ranking factors for pageviews. As a best practice, using 2-3 related keyphrases or synonyms will be sufficient.
Q. How can we collaborate more on suggested keywords and existing blogs with the same general topic?
A. Ideas for collaboration:
Chatting within the Content Planning Airtable Topic item
tag whoever submitted the keyword topic/theme if you need more information or how to differentiate from existing blog posts or if there is an opportunity to perhaps update an existing blog post
Q. Will you be reviewing and updating meta descriptions for blogs on a regular basis, as you did for the Nurses Week blogs? Or can we discuss how to approach meta description updates, if that would help our traffic, as well.
A. We will add a monthly task to our SEO queue to review blog-specific pages to see if top pages are trending down in traffic or keyword rankings are dropping and update these in prioritized batches. We can update the metadata and heading tags to better match the target keyword and provide any additional SEO recommendations for edits. We can keep these in a shared excel sheet so the blog team can review/approve before adjustment.
We can show the Blog team how to set up Ahrefs Keyword Rank tracker so Ahrefs will identify areas where keywords are trending downward and then this page can be updated for meta and on page SEO changes.
Q. Do you think it would pay off better to do a bunch of quick fixes like tweaking titles, leads, and subheads to better match keywords or do fewer in-depth updates that overhaul some blogs that have declined?
A. There is not really a definitive best answer to this question, as neither is a quick fix. I recommend looking into the pages that have declined significantly in traffic YoY first, then seeing whether the content is still relevant, then making updates to metadata, H1s, and content.
Questions for Content:
We recommend starting to build out blog series for certain keywords to target these terms better. A series or topic clusters helps to go deeper in-depth on a topic and address more specific keywords within a larger focus keyword.
Look into blogs that we already have/update current content
Start with our categories, salaries, job hunting, interviewing, workplace violence, maternal mortality, podcast topics.
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