Speaker 1: To wrap up this course, we're going to talk about something which is really important in the long term. Content maintenance. Because, sure, producing great content is really awesome. But it's not enough. Maintaining your content is like taking care of a beautiful garden. Every once in a while, you have to reassess which plants and flowers are working for you, and which aren't. You also have to weed and trim the bushes. Without gardening, content maintenance can be a lot of work. But it's also rewarding in terms of SEO, because it keeps your content relevant and focused, and makes sure that the right articles are there to rank for the right keywords. On a website, some information is bound to become outdated or stale. This means that you need to put effort into keeping it relevant and fresh for visitors. Firstly, you can achieve this, obviously, by updating existing articles. Alternatively, some of these articles may have even become so outdated that you prefer to delete and redirect them. Thirdly, you can merge pieces of older but still relevant content from several stale articles to create fresh content. This means you'll have less content to keep updated to. In this video, we're going to explore what you need to be aware of when it comes to maintaining your content, and how you can strategize your content maintenance. Let's start by talking about a big SEO risk that tends to rear its ugly head when your site grows bigger, and you're producing more and more content. Keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization happens when different pages of your site are competing for the same keywords in a search engine. This happens a lot with growing websites that publish a lot of new articles, because they'll write a ton of content about their favorite topics. But before they know it, all these articles will end up to be quite similar, at least in Google's eyes. To tackle this topic, let's take a food blog, Meryl's Munchies, as an example. This food blogger in particular is a big fan of Spanish cuisine, and loves paella. She's written no less than 8 separate articles on paella for her site, and 4 of them are quite similar. For example, one article is called Paella, what it is and how to cook it. Another is called Paella for Beginners. Then there's an article called Paella Quick and Easy. And then there's another, Paella in 15 Minutes. She used to rank quite well for the last article I mentioned, but a couple of months later, she checks how her articles are doing in the search engine one more time. They all do rank, but none ranks as well as that single one used to. But why? Meryl's content is competing with itself, and Google can't tell which of the articles should rank highest. What Meryl should do, then, is create one very good article about paella for novice cooks. But we'll come back to that later. For now, we've identified two content maintenance problems, and improving on them can help your SEO. We've talked about stale and outdated content, and we've talked about keyword cannibalization. Now, let's look at how you can solve issues like these. At Yoast, we believe that there's four steps to content maintenance. One, you audit the content on your site. Two, you analyze the performance of your content. Three, you decide which content you want to update, delete, or merge. And four, you act. Now this is nothing too shocking, of course, but let's look at how to best tackle those steps one by one. So first, you audit your site. You start by choosing a topic you discuss often on your site. For Meryl, that might be paella. For us, it might be, for example, keyword research. Two tips. Your head keywords, as well as your categories and tags, may be a good source for this audit. So let's explore Meryl's site further. She wants to further explore her rankings for the paella articles, to see what went wrong and what she can do about it. A logical first step is to assess which articles are about or mention the word paella. If Meryl has tagged her articles with a paella tag, this shouldn't be too difficult. If she hasn't, she might use her internal search function to find out. After that, she can use Google to see what Google can find. I do this by entering site colon merylsmunchies.com paella between quotation marks in the search bar. This way, all the articles that mention paella will pop up, ranked and ready to be analyzed. So now Meryl knows she has 8 articles about paella on her website, 4 of which, as we've seen before, are very similar. Moreover, there are another 15 pages where she mentions paella in passing. Cool, so now you know how to map out your problems. Now let's see how you can check how your pages are performing. Which leads us to the second step, analyzing the performance of the articles. For this step, we recommend using Google's search console. In the performance section, you can filter for your query. For Meryl, it's paella. This makes Google's search console match all queries that contain the word paella. This provides her with some important data. 1. A list of the keywords her site has been shown in the search results for. 2. A list of the pages that received all that traffic and how much traffic each of the individual pages received. Knowing this, Meryl can tell which pages obtained the most traffic. She should keep those, obviously. People seem to find these articles helpful or interesting. The ones that get little to no traffic, however, she should take a closer look at. Why aren't these articles receiving traffic? Are people not interested? Does she have a lot of competition from bigger websites? Or is there something she could do to improve her content? And as we've seen, the latter is true for Meryl. She should actually do something about the articles that are cannibalizing on each other. Oh, by the way, one last tip for Google's search console. You can also use the page filter option instead of the query filter option. This way, you can assess the page more broadly by analyzing traffic that isn't generated by the specific keywords you've entered. Once you've analyzed the performance of your pages, it's time for the third step. It's decision time. Take a moment to decide what you're going to do. Simply keep the article as is, update the article, delete the article, or merge articles. If you delete them, make sure to redirect them to a relevant page. Don't know how? Don't worry. In the next video, we'll explore best practices of content maintenance in full detail. When you decide to delete articles, always check if there's any information that's worth keeping. You can add that info to another post. When posts are clearly optimized for other search terms than the one you're assessing, keep them. And then the fourth and last step all there is left to do is act. You've made a list of what's going to stay, what's going to be different, and what's going to go. So let's say Meryl gets to work. After a while, she has one very strong article about cooking simple paella recipes by adding the best pieces of information from the other articles to that one. She has deleted and redirected the other three posts to the one post that performed best. So people clicking the old links don't end up on an empty page. The other posts she wrote on paella were all performing fine, so no worries there. Now, Meryl is ready to reclaim her good rankings for keywords aimed at easy paella recipes. Yay. Now, it's crucial that you go through this process every once in a while for several parts of your site. We recommend following these steps for every important cluster of keywords you use at least every year. If your site is quite big, it's probably a good idea to make this a continuous process. Oh, by the way, we know that's a lot of work. So we've built a functionality into the Yoast SEO Premium plugin that helps you stay on top of your most important articles. We have a so-called Stale Cornerstone Content Filter, which lets you know which of your cornerstone content articles you haven't updated in six months. In the post overview, you'll see a filter that you can use to list all your stale cornerstone articles. In that way, you'll be able to get to work immediately. As you want your cornerstone content to be top-notch, keep an eye on this every once in a while. It really helps you stay up-to-date. To conclude, in this video we showed you some of the risks you run if you don't maintain your content well, as well as some of the merits of grabbing the bull by the horns. We've discussed stale content and keyword cannibalization. Then we discussed the four steps of an effective content maintenance strategy. Finally, we showed you how the Stale Cornerstone Content Filter in Yoast SEO Premium can help you smooth this process. In the next video, we'll dive deeper into the choices you need to make during this process – updating, merging, or deleting.