Content Audit 101: What to Do with Outdated Blog Posts
Blogging should be a part of your digital marketing strategy from day 1. But now it’s day 5000, and you have hundreds of blogs. You were a young, ambitious blogger once, and so you wrote about every topic you could think of to get a click or two. But now, you’re an experienced blogger with a focus, and reading through your old blogs makes you cringe. So what can you do about these bad, old blogs?
You don’t want to just delete them. That could hurt your SEO. It’s a good idea to do a content audit first and then decide what to optimize depending on how the blog serves you. I’ll explain what to do about bad, old blogs and why you want to do a content audit to keep your audience engaged.
What Is A Blog?
A blog is a regularly updated section of a website, typically made up of articles (called "posts") that cover specific topics of interest. Blogs can educate, entertain, build brand awareness, and support SEO by targeting keywords your audience is searching for.
A blog can be an announcement of your new products, an in-depth look at a specific service, or an expansion on a frequently asked question you are often asked by customers. These are just a few examples, but they’re a great way to start your blog-writing journey.
Old blog posts can be a goldmine of SEO potential—or a liability that drags down your entire website. If you’ve been publishing content for a while, chances are you’ve got some outdated or underperforming posts in your archives.
What Is A Blog Content Audit?
A blog content audit is a comprehensive review of your existing blog content to assess its performance and relevance. During an audit, you typically look at:
Traffic and engagement metrics - Crack open GA4 and inspect each blog URL and look at the traffic for the previous year or two. You may be surprised by what you find.
Keyword rankings - Sometimes, you might be ranking high for a weird keyword because you blogged about it once. Optimizing blogs to realign with better keywords is a smart idea.
Internal and external backlinks - linking is important when it comes to blog writing. You should link externally to prove authority, but also link internally to keep potential customers clicking within your website.
Accuracy and timeliness of the content - Many people like to date their blogs, but that can come back to bite them. Putting the year in the title in the URL might jump to the top of the SERP in 2022, but now that it's 2025, that blog is no longer performing.
Technical SEO factors (like meta descriptions and page speed) - If your blogs are image-heavy, they could be slow to load, which can cause your site to slow down. Make sure your images are compressed properly. Also, make sure your blog has a catchy meta description with the keyword within the copy.
The goal of a blog content audit is to figure out which posts are helping your site—and which are holding it back.
How To Fix Bad, Old Blogs
Not all old content is bad. Some of it might just be outdated or could use a refresh. Now that you’ve done your content audit, you can see that you’ve got blog posts that are irrelevant, inaccurate, or simply not performing. It’s time to take action. Depending on the situation, you typically have three options: redirect, optimize, or consolidate.
When to Redirect Blogs
Let’s say you find an old blog that you want to get rid of. Although there might be a “delete” option, don’t do it! Although your blog is deleted from your website, the URL could still be out in the Google-verse, being recommended to searchers. If someone clicks on that blog and it no longer exists, that searcher will get a 404. This can be detrimental to your SEO. Its better to redirect the blog to a blog of a similar topic, or the main blog page.
Redirecting a blog post is a good idea when the content is:
Completely outdated and no longer useful - take that 2022 blog and redirect it to your 2025 blog.
Targeting a topic you no longer cover - hey, we all change. It’s good to remove blogs about topics you no longer cover so you don’t confuse your audience.
Cannibalizing traffic from a better-performing post - It’s easy to fall into a trap of writing about the same topics again and again. Don’t compete with yourself. Take lower-performing blogs and redirect them to better ones.
Generating no traffic or engagement whatsoever - Bye Felicia.
301 redirects can be set up to take an old URL to a more relevant or higher-performing page. This way, any SEO value or backlinks aren’t lost—they’re passed on to a more useful destination.
Leigh’s Example:
During the content audit for a travel agency, I found an old blog about the benefits of eating almonds. This blog was written in 2015, had no relevant information or links about traveling, and wasn’t performing at all. That goes straight into the redirect pile.
When to Optimize Blogs
Optimizing is when you add content, keywords, links, or all three to an existing blog. I’ve worked with many clients who have tons of blogs, but they are all less than 100 words with no headings. These blogs are not performing for them, and they could be beefed up a little. This is what optimizing is: the process of improving existing blogs.
Covers a still-relevant topic - How can we tie this topic back to our business? Let’s make sure we’re linking to the right services.
Gets some traffic, but not as much as it could - Let’s add some more keywords or see if there’s a question that’s not being answered here.
It is ranking, but not on the first page - Some blogs just need an extra push. A little optimization can go a long way for rankings
Has outdated statistics or links - This should be an important part of your blog audit. Make sure to get rid of broken links.
Could benefit from better structure, media, or keywords - Having enough keywords isn’t always enough. Making sure keywords are in the title, headings, and meta description is important.
Optimization can include rewriting parts of the post, adding new information, improving internal linking, or updating visuals and meta tags. Don’t just write a new blog and redirect the old blog. A blog optimization can take just as much work as writing a blog at times, but it could have a leg up on the competition because it is an existing URL. Google loves to see blogs get updated.
Leigh’s Example:
I had a basement remodeling client who had a high-performing blog about the furnace in the movie “Home Alone”. This blog wasn’t really relevant to their business, but it was performing very high. So we optimized it. We talked about how the McAlister family had a scary basement, and if your basement was scary like theirs, call the basement remodeling company.
When to Consolidate Blogs
If you have multiple blog posts targeting similar topics, it might make sense to consolidate them. This is great when you have lots of low-performing blogs, but you don’t feel like optimizing them is enough. This is especially useful when:
Posts overlap and compete for the same keywords - Again, don’t compete with yourself. Redirect outdated blogs to new blogs, and think of a new spin on a topic you’ve covered in the past.
None of the posts is strong enough to stand alone - If you have a bunch of posts on a topic, but they all seem weak, combining them into a stronger blog could be helpful.
The content would be more valuable as a comprehensive guide - When you write a section of a blog, maybe there’s a topic you wish you could expand on more. Combine the bad, old blogs into a new comprehensive guide.
When consolidating, choose the strongest post to keep, merge the best content from the others into it, and then redirect the old URLs to the new, enhanced version.
Leigh’s Example:
I had an electrician client, and every year he would write a blog “10 New Year's resolutions for your electrical system in 20XX” and it was copy + paste the same blog each year. So this was an excellent opportunity to redirect the old blogs to the latest year.
Help! I Need A Content Audit
If your website is plagued with bad, old, blogs - talk to me. My name is Leigh Andrzejewski, and I am a local Indianapolis SEO and Content Specialist. Whether it's coming up with blog topics, writing blogs, or chasing after the right keywords, I can help. Cleaning up blogs is no fun, and a comprehensive content audit could be just what you need to start rebooting your SEO strategy. Talk to me today.