Advanced SEO copywriting - Module 6.2
Dealing with existing content
Learning objectives
1. Existing content
2. Dealing with comments
3. Content cannibalization
4. Content maintenance strategy
Key takeaways
Learning objectives
In this lesson, you’ll learn:
● why you should respond to comments on posts, and how;
● why content maintenance is important;
● what content cannibalization is;
● how to maintain your content by finding outdated content and fixing
that;
● how to use the stale cornerstone content function in the Yoast SEO
plugin.
1. Existing content In this day and age, everything is about the production of content. There’s
deadline after deadline to reach, endless quotas to fill, and we publish and
publish and publish. Because that’s how you get clicks and stay relevant in a
competitive industry.
To offer a fantastic user experience, you have to keep track of your existing
content, too. You have to interact with your users when they comment on
your posts. Also, you have to update your outdated articles, to make sure
that you give users the freshest, most relevant information. Don’t you hate it
when you’re looking for some info, and you find a seemingly promising
article, only to find out it was published in 2009? You just wasted your time
because the content isn't even relevant anymore. This is why content
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maintenance is essential.
2. Dealing with comments Let’s start with something simple: the comments on your posts. Why would
you react to people who comment? Well, people like it when you interact
with them. If you respond to comments, people will feel involved and
become more likely to return to your site.
You don’t have to handle comments immediately. However, it’s considered
polite to respond in no more than two days. It shows your readers that
you’re involved.
Generally, we advise people to respond to comments in a patient and
helpful manner. This builds trust. And, if people are happy with how you
help them, they might recommend your website or product to friends.
The type of comments you receive on a post may depend on the content you
create. For example, if you’ve written a politically charged article, there’s
bound to be people with a different opinion. Or, if you’ve written a how-to on
the best way to make strawberry jam, people might chime in to add their
favorite ingredients.
Depending on the type of comment you receive, you will need to give an
appropriate reply. Generally speaking, we can divide comments into four
types:
1. positive feedback;
2. negative feedback;
3. questions;
4. spam.
So, let’s see what kind of reply fits them.
Positive feedback
Everyone likes a compliment. Okay, well, maybe not everyone, but you get
the point. There’s not much that you can do wrong when responding to
positive feedback. Simply express gratitude by saying thanks, or invite them
to read a related post that you know off the top of your head. In Image 1,
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you can see an example of how one of our co-workers handles some
positive feedback.
Image 1: Hanneke shows appreciation to Salman
Negative feedback
Negative comments are harder to tackle. Sometimes, people disagree with
what you wrote. Or maybe they didn’t like your product. Perhaps they just
woke up on the wrong side of the bed. But, you still have to take these
comments seriously. Deleting these comments isn’t always the best option,
because people could interpret that as an attempt to censor them.
Generally, we advise a patient and helpful approach. Try to find out what’s
wrong and solve the problem.
If you find yourself in an extended discussion that is getting increasingly
hostile, stay calm, and empathetic. Keep in mind that it’s not personal.
Acknowledge the person’s viewpoint and continue trying to solve the issue.
However, some people can’t be pleased. Be friendly, but firm when you end
a discussion like this.
In Image 2, you can see an example of how we would deal with a negative
comment. Image 3 shows an example of a poor response to a negative
comment.
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Image 2: Jesse responds to an unhappy customer by offering help
Image 3: Max responds poorly to a fair complaint.
Questions
Dealing with questions can be surprisingly hard, especially if you don’t know
the answer (yet). But it’s rewarding to reply to a question. If you don’t know
the answer, be truthful about that. People will appreciate your honesty. If
you don’t know the answer but are committed to helping the reader, you can
look it up, or provide the reader with a lead. In Image 4, you can see an
example of a Yoast co-worker dealing with a question on a post.
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Image 4: Willemien offers advice to help Marcin out with his question
Spam
Some comments will be utter nonsense or an attempt at getting your
readers to click on unrelated links. We call this spam. The best way to
respond to spam is to delete it. You can also get a spam filter to take care of
this job for you. In WordPress, you can use the default spam filter plugin
Akismet.
3. Content cannibalization Now that we’ve discussed comments, let’s move on to bigger things.
Remember when we mentioned deadlines and quotas? When a site grows
larger, there will be more and more posts and articles that need managing.
Without keeping a solid content inventory, there’s a good chance people
forget which topics they covered a year ago. So, they end up writing a new
post about the same thing.
This causes content cannibalization. When a site has posts with the same
keywords and angle, search engines will get confused about which article
they should rank higher. For example, if you have an article called “Ten fun
ways to prepare for Christmas”, and another one called “Christmas
preparations: ten tips for a jolly holiday!”, the articles are likely to be too
similar. They’re competing for the same keywords. This might hurt your
rankings. So, to deal with this, you need to think about content maintenance.
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4. Content maintenance strategy Every once in a while, just like a house, a website deserves a good spring
cleaning. This will prevent content cannibalization. You also have to be
aware of stale content. If kept unchecked, there’ll be old, irrelevant posts and
outdated pages. Let’s pick up a broom and deal with all the dusty content.
But where do you start?
In short, we recommend performing four actions to maintain your content
and prevent keyword cannibalization:
1. audit;
2. analyze;
3. decide;
4. act.
Now let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Audit
When you make an audit, you essentially examine your existing content. In
this case, you should check if there is any duplicate content that can cause
cannibalization. And, don’t forget to look for any stale posts.
Start by thinking about the topics that are the most important on your site.
For example, if you run a blog about dogs, dog food might be a common
topic in a bunch of your posts. So, to find these posts, you can search your
site in Google. You do this by typing in site: [sitename] “[focus
keyword]” in the Google search bar. The search engine then gives you all
the posts and pages that mention this topic. This means that only some of
these posts will actually be written around this topic. Others might mention
it in passing. You can see an example of what a site: search looks like in
Image 5.
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Image 5: Audit your site
Before you move on to analyzing, filter the results. Make a list of the articles
that focus on the topic you are auditing. And, leave out the articles that only
mention the topic in passing.
Analyze
Now, let’s move on to the next step. Analyzing the list of posts you’ve found.
Let’s get cracking on determining how these posts perform. We recommend
using Google Search Console for this. To use the Google Search Console
you have to verify domain ownership via a DNS record.
Google Search Console can give you a lot of data, but this is what you’re
looking for when you enter your focus keyword into the Performance
section:
1. The popular keywords for your site.
2. The clicks and click-through rates for these keywords.
3. A list of pages that receive this traffic and how much traffic each
page receives.
You find this info by opening up the Google Search Console and choose the
Performance option under Status in the menu. Then you create a new
Query filter in the filter bar. Enter your keyword and apply the filter.
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Image 6: Google Search Console’s Performance option
You can also use the Page filter option. This allows you to filter your content
by a group of URLs, or a specific URL. This way, you can check each post
individually. In that way, you can check the traffic that the posts receive
regardless of the keyword you entered earlier. After all, they might rank well
on a different query.
Now you know which of your posts perform well and which perform less
well. This is an important input for the next step.
Decide
So, you’ve audited and analyzed your site. You’ve got a lot of information on
the performance of your posts, but now you need to make some decisions.
How are you going to deal with the posts that need to change? Here are
three options to ponder over:
Update
Updating is your top pick for old, stale content. Update your post to make it
fresh, relevant, and interesting to your site’s visitors.
You can even republish the updated post. This way, it’ll receive a bump in the
feed. But beware, republishing is not the same as reposting. Reposting is
when you post an article again so that there are two versions. You don’t want
that, because it’ll hurt your search engine ranking. You want to republish,
which is changing the original article and pressing the “Publish” button in the
WordPress Editor. We go into more detail on how to republish later in this
text.
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Merge
This is a good solution for content cannibalization. If two articles are too
similar, you can put them together to make a new, better post. But, merging
can work for stale content, too. Maybe the post isn’t relevant enough to
warrant an update. But it does have some interesting bits that are worth
working into another post.
So, you can merge two or more posts. Always merge posts into the most
popular one. And, don’t forget to delete and redirect the scrap posts to the
newly merged article.
Delete
Lastly, you can delete a post that you can’t salvage in any way. When you
delete a post it’s crucial to redirect it to another relevant post. Google
penalizes undirected URLs because it makes it harder to crawl sites
efficiently.
Act Now you know which options there are and what they entail. But what do
you need to do to make your decision work out well?
Update
So, how do you go about updating a stale article? First, assess the content of
the article. Is any of the information you’re giving outdated? Can you think of
new, fresh examples to explain why your viewpoint is the right one? Can you
switch out the images for better ones? Then, edit your text and hit “update”!
If you feel like a post could use some extra attention, you might decide to
republish it. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t just republish any old
post. Only republish an article if it’s useful and relevant at that point in time.
What does republishing entail in a practical sense? Well, here are four
actions to take:
1. Edit the article as you would with a regular update.
2. Change the published date in the backend to the current date. You
do this by navigating the Document section when you’re editing a
post. Next to Publish, you’ll find a date that you can edit. When you’re
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done editing the date the article will automatically appear at the top
of your feed (Image 7).
Image 7: Publish date in the WordPress backend.
3. Delete old comments, otherwise, these will reappear. You do this by
navigating to your posts section in the WordPress backend. Then,
select the comment icon for the updated page (Image 8). You will
arrive on a page with the isolated comments for that post. In the
toolbar, you will have a Bulk Action option. Set this to Move to Trash
and press Apply (Image 9).
Image 8: Comments in the post section
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Image 9: Comments on a post
4. This step is optional: include the republished post in your newsletter
or social media to give it some extra attention.
Merge
Merging content is even simpler. You want to keep the most popular post.
Take the relevant content from the stale or cannibalizing post and rework it
into the popular post. Then, trash the old post and redirect the URL to the
merged article. How do you properly redirect a deleted post? Let’s talk about
it.
Deleting and redirecting
We mentioned that you should redirect a post when you decide to trash it.
But how? Well, you can use a 301 redirect message. It’s like a
change-of-address notification for Google; “You can find what you’re looking
for over there!”. It tells Google that the page has been permanently moved.
Alternatively, you can use a 410 redirect message. This will inform Google
that the post has been permanently deleted.
If you don’t assign a 301 or 410 to a trashed post, you’ll get the dreaded 404
page not found. This will confuse Google and might damage your rankings.
Luckily, you can easily set up these changes by using the redirect manager
in our Yoast SEO Premium plugin. If you trash a post you’ll get a popup
where you can assign a 301 or 410 to it. If you choose 301, you then fill in the
URL you want to redirect the page to. Lastly, you save the change. Simple as
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pie! Of course, you can also go to the Redirects menu option for a manual
approach.
Image 10: The Redirects option in Yoast SEO Premium
Stale cornerstone content filter
We know that content maintenance is a lot of hard work. That’s why we
created the Stale cornerstone content filter for Yoast SEO Premium. This
function will track your cornerstone content and give you a warning if you
haven’t updated it for half a year. If it pops up in this filter, you know that
you’ve got some updating to do.
Image 11: The Stale cornerstone content filter
Key takeaways
• Deal with comments within two days.
• Respond to comments in a patient and helpful manner.
• Content cannibalization is when posts compete with each other in search
engine ranking because they have the same focus keyword.
• Practice a content maintenance strategy by auditing, analyzing, deciding,
and acting on potentially stale or cannibalized content.
• Republish stale posts by editing the post, changing the post date in the
WordPress backend, and deleting its comments.
• You can use the Stale cornerstone content filter in our Yoast SEO Premium
plugin to find important cornerstone posts that need attention.
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