How to Manage Outdated Content on Your Website (with free audit template)

When writing online content for your website, you should usually make sure it’s evergreen. This way, you avoid wasting time chasing your tail and updating content on a near-constant basis. Having said that, letting content stagnate on your site causes a noticeable drop in organic search traffic to your site.

Quick links:

• Why outdated content is a problem
• How to identify outdated content
• Download your free Content Audit Template
• How to manage outdated content

Why outdated content is a problem

When you publish content on your site, more isn’t necessarily better.

Imagine your site as a house. You probably wouldn’t install a new kitchen, put a hot tub in the garden, and build a cinema room in the basement while your dusty, old boiler struggles to heat your home and the roof tiles are falling down.

In other words, adding more and more content to your site while neglecting existing content can cause a drop in search engine performance, user trust, and crucially, the overall experience for site visitors.

How to identify outdated content

The good news is that identifying outdated content doesn’t require guesswork – or your heating going off.

A content audit can help you dig into your site’s pages and look for content that could benefit from a refresh.

The first step is to use tools like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog to identify low traffic or high-bounce rates on particular pages.

Once you’ve collated a list of these pages, you can analyse each one in more detail, identifying obsolete data, expired offers, out-of-date information, or old references, like mentions of current affairs. This will help you pick out exactly what needs to be updated, deleted or refreshed.

Download your free Content Audit Template

Want some help structuring your content audit? Make sure you’re covering all bases with our free downloadable template.

How to manage outdated content

Once you’ve used the tools above to identify issues with your content, it’s time to put together a plan of action.

Enhance/update

Updating stats, links, visuals, and content to target new keywords leads to better search rankings and an increased sense of trust from site visitors. Outdated content on your website can be a snowball effect; at first, you might not realise there’s a drop in traffic that it’s causing, but over time, the loss in traffic will become more noticeable. Staying on top of this helps to prevent large drops in traffic before it becomes a problem.

Consolidate

Multiple pages that cover the same topic split traffic, affecting your ability to measure the content’s performance. Use keyword research, identify the useful content across the pages, and consolidate it into one page – ideally, the one that already has the highest traffic. Once you’ve merged the content, you can implement a redirect from the other pages to the optimised page to drive traffic.

Noindexing

No indexing is a vital tool for ensuring that Google doesn’t crawl your entire site for content that is necessary but ultimately offers your users very little. Things like search results pages do not need to appear in Google search rankings, so marking them as noindex will ensure that more of your crawl budget is spent on the high-value content you want serving to users. On the other hand, noindexing high-value content can lead to a drop in traffic and search engine performance, so be sure to only noindex content you don’t want users to see in search results.

Delete & redirect

Even if the content used to be great, some content isn’t designed to be on your site forever; eventually, it causes drops in traffic and a poor user experience. On the other side of the coin, a content audit might also identify content that falls below the high standards your business sets – you should also remove this if it’s not cost-efficient to enhance.

Tips for optimising content

For the sharpest content, you need to implement a couple of key principles when optimising the content.

First things first, it’s important to ensure your content is actually useful to the target audience, answering the key questions that the title poses. Understanding and meeting the needs of your audience must be a high priority when it comes to content optimisation. Otherwise, you run the risk of your content continuing to fall flat and having little impact on users.

A content audit also gives you a great opportunity to highlight where you can add new insights, update visuals, and improve the structure of the content for improved UX and SEO performance. It’s also a chance to look at the quality of your content and check whether it meets your brand values and tone of voice.  

Outdated content on your site is troublesome at best, and fatal at worst. Conducting a content audit, identifying the issues, and actioning solutions will be a breath of fresh air for your content marketing strategy, enabling you to turn content into customers.

If you’re struggling to wrap your head around content audits or any other area of digital marketing, you’re in the right place. Get in touch with our experts at BANC to chat through your site’s needs and how we can help.