Content Audit Part 4 – Evaluating Your Old Blog Posts

In our last couple issues, we got a little nerdy to be honest. 🙂 We were busy collecting and exporting data about all of our old blog posts, throwing it into spreadsheets, yada yada.

Now, we can begin the actual evaluation process.

First of all, you may find that it is helpful to begin GRADING your blog posts as you go. Just like grade school, we can give this a simple A-to-F grading system.

Assigning this page grade would be rather subjective on your part. You would be checking out each of your blog posts and grading it yourself based on how good you think it is. An “A” would be for a blog post that you think is among your best posts. An “A” post performs well, is well written, and is something you feel proud of. On the flip side, an “F” post would be one that you’re frankly embarrassed is still there. 😉

So, yes, there is a definite element of “gut feeling” that will go into how you grade your own posts. But, a few things to consider might include:

• Is the post well written?
• Is it really useful?
• Is it optimized well? (You may want to see Anatomy Of The Perfect Blog Post: A Complete Guide To Ideal Blog Post Structure And Formatting for more on that)
• Does it reflect your current style and current business?
• Is it up-to-date?

So, you as you go through your old posts one by one, you can assign this grade to the content, A through F. Then, as we begin to make judgement calls, this page grade would help guide us on what we intend to do with the post.

• KEEP. For our A and B posts, we’ll definitely keep them. They’re probably already pretty optimized and well written, since they were graded well. You may make a few edits to it, but otherwise these posts will stay close to what they are now.
• UPDATE. These would be for your low-level B posts, your C posts, and maybe some of your D posts. These are posts that can be decent assets for your business, but need to be improved.
• REMOVE. Your F posts – and maybe some of your D posts – would simply be removed and, if needed, redirected to a better post.
• CONSOLIDATE. For posts which are good, but perhaps too short and don’t offer enough value on their own, you can flag it to be consolidated into one big post. Then, you would redirect these posts to your new, improved asset.

This is a matter of judgement. There is no definitive scoring system I could give you here that makes these decisions for you. Both the grading and the decision on what to do with it is up to you.

As you go through your content and assign grades, you might want to take a few notes for yourself about that post and what you may intend to do with it.

For instance, as I started my own content audit, I found several old income report blog posts. For various reasons that I outline on this blog post, I no longer believe publishing income reports is a good idea. So, I made a note to myself on those posts that my intention was to write a new blog post to which to redirect all those income reports to.

You can simply create a new column in your spreadsheet so that you can keep notes on each post as you check it out. If you want to keep internal notes on each post right inside Wordpress, you can do that, too.

• You could use something like Advanced Custom Fields to create a custom field just for your own personal notes on your posts. ACF gives you the ability to place that field anywhere you want in the post interface. I love ACF.
• WP Noteup is a plug-in which does pretty much what ACF would do, giving you an internal notes field on your content.

Personally, I prefer using ACF. Here’s what my own admin notes field looks like inside my own admin panel:

Using Advanced Custom Fields, I simply did the following:

1. ​Created a new field group called “Admin Notes”.
2. For that field group, I created a field called “admin notes”. I set it to be a textarea form input that is 4 rows high (so that it doesn’t take too much room).
3. For the location settings of my field group, I set it to appear there “Post Type” equals “Post”. It is the default value anyway, so super easy. Just means this field will show up when editing any blog post. You can also make it appear on pages, custom post types… whatever.
4. For the Position of my field group, I chose the “Side”. This way, the field will appear in the right sidebar of the post editing screen and not in the main content column with the main editor.

Easy-peasy. When I first went to one of my blog post editing screens, the field was there but pushed down toward the bottom. But, you can simply drag it up toward the top. I put it right under my MemberMouse options.

Anyway, with a field like this, you can then record your own internal notes for any post in your archives. These notes will not be viewed publicly anywhere. It is only for you.

And you can use it to post little decisions as to your page grade, what you might intend to do with the post, etc.

Alright…

I think that’s enough for today on this.

I warn you…

Don’t get too carried away with Advanced Custom Fields. 😉 It is easy to. I use it pretty extensively for a variety of things around here. But, here in this article, I’m just bringing it up as an easy way to set up a field which you might find handy for our content audit.

See ya on the next issue.

You got this.

And…have an awesome week. 🙂

– David