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There’s a lot of awesome content on the company blog – but there’s also a ton of outdated material.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
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.
Sloths are lagging a bit in engagement metrics.
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.
The perks
Jason has found a clear way into an otherwise messy content library.
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
