Auditing & Archiving Your Business Blog: A Quick Guide

Here at the Sarah Moon Blog Lab™, we recently embarked on a rather quick and large migration of our website from WordPress back to Squarespace, thanks to the big mess WordPress is in right now that was impacting our site’s stability. One of my main tasks was making sure the blog—our biggest driver of new business—moved over cleanly and clearly.

With lots of little fiddly items to take care of, such as our calls to action vaporizing into an unknown universe of lost code, it was an opportune time to do some auditing of our content.

While we are good at keep everything up-to-date with new content, sometimes we forget what content is sitting there creating very little traffic, not much engagement, and not contributing meaningfully to our marketing ecosystem—most often because it is dated or industries shifted or we both were like, “We don’t actually care about this anymore.”

After importing the entire blog (a very exciting and stressful experience on its own), the first thing I did was start the process of what could be unpublished. And that’s what I am going to spend a little time talking about, because I learned a lot of lessons.

Tip #1: Run the Numbers on Your Blog Posts’ Performance

Sarah, being the keen SEO strategists she is, is on top of what traffic looks like on the site and what pages and posts are doing particularly well.

I worked backward and looked what blog posts traffic was not performing. I did not immediately strike those sites, but it gave me a good idea where things stood. Looking at the trends, I could see that some of our content was designed to promote from services we didn’t offer anymore and had zero impact on our bottom line, which lined up with one of my ideas of what should go. We did keep some of these posts about our clients and what they accomplished, even though the metrics were not there, simply because it is a good idea to have a long record of success that people can see when they are exploring the business. Plus, we kept some because we loved the client and it made us happy to their projects again.

There were also blog posts I kept because they provided context for other posts. While people weren’t clicking much organically from the search engine, editorially it made sense to keep that option. Delinking would work, but I like the ease of use for the reader who wants that context.

Looking at the posts that were doing well and a bit older, I could see that some blog posts we consistently get traffic for needed a refresh and those went into the list of necessary updates.

Tip #2: Put on Your Editor’s Hat

This import of the blog started with posts from 2016, and there were more that had been unpublished in a previous blog clean-up—we have been at this for awhile!

As I was doing the bits and bobs that all posts needed (and every post that was going to be published required individual attention), I was able to quickly scan and make preliminary decisions about what each post was contributing. And, working together with Sarah (who wrote most of the posts), were able to come to decisions fairly quickly.

I actually enjoyed this editorial process a lot! The second thing I was able to do was find some articles that were really good conceptually but needed some updating on the particulars (especially things like service providers and the like) to make them work harder for us in our marketing. Some of these I left up on the blog and made plans to update and some that were really out of date I unpublished and promised to come back to.

This was also a good time to really take stock of if some blog posts about our discontinued services had something to contribute to our overall blog still, and how they would fit with the categories and Alignthority® System we now use. It is really a nice exercise in seeing how your business progresses and how the foundations of your past work informs your current work. This older content also is a mark of long term expertise and credibility.

Tip #3: Organize Your Blog So It Makes Sense All Together

The final piece was taking what we have kept published and working to make sure that they were organized in the appropriate way so that related articles and categories allowed readers to explore further into our content. We decided to use the category function in Squarespace and make those categories work with our Alignthority® framework.

In the past I used tags without much of a long term plan (oh, I paid for that) and decided that I would only use tags for a couple of specific series of articles (such as our articles on education), so that the summary block would display the other articles in the series. This has worked and hopefully this overall simplification will be easier to manage in the future.

Long term maintenance is good for a healthy blog and will also help with the issue we all have of “what’s next.” Digging through the archives is a chance to find things that you have written before and rewrite/rework them for your future content needs.

So there you have it! Our recent migration to Squarespace, while a big, stressful job, was also golden opportunity to dive deep into our blog archives and conduct a much-needed content audit. By analyzing performance metrics, applying a critical editorial eye, and reorganizing our content for optimal navigation, we were able to streamline our blog and ensure it aligns with our current business goals and marketing strategies.

Your Key Business Blogging Takeaway:

Remember, a healthy blog isn't just about creating new content; it's also about regularly revisiting and refining your existing work. By following these tips, you can transform your blog—no matter how old or unorganized—into a strategic asset that drives traffic, generates leads, and establishes your expertise.