SEO

In 2023, my team and I began working on perhaps one of the most ambitious content audits ever conducted on the HubSpot Blog. We’ve run content audits in the past — but not like this. We ran the audit in three phases: Phase 1 addressed our oldest content. Phase 2 evaluated our lowest-performing content. Phase 3 assessed the value of our topic clusters. When it was all said and done, we audited over 10,000 blog post URLs and over 450 topic clusters. In this post, I’m going to focus on phase one of our audit. I’ll walk you through how we audited our oldest content and how we took action. Plus, I’ll share the results we found. But first, let me give you some background on why we decided to run an audit of this magnitude. Why We Audited It all started in early 2023. At the time, my team was called the Historical Optimization team and we sat at the intersection of HubSpot’s SEO and Blog teams. We were responsible for updating and optimizing our existing blog posts and finding growth opportunities within our library. (We’ve since evolved into what is now the EN Blog Strategy team.) In case you’re new here, the HubSpot Blog is HUGE. For context, the blog was home to 13,822 pages in February of 2023, the month we began our audit. While we are fortunate to have a high domain authority and drive millions of visits per month, having a blog of this size does not come without challenges. As our library ages, the amount of opportunity for new content across our blog properties and clusters shrinks. So, we decided to audit our library to find opportunities for optimization. We hypothesized that we could uncover “greenspace” and “quasi-greenspace” — topics that we have covered but haven’t capitalized on that well — by auditing the oldest 4,000 URLs in our library. Although this was only about a third of our content library, we believed we’d be able to unearth some traffic opportunities and give our blog a boost. Around the same time, we started to feel the effects of Google’s March 2023 Core Update that emphasized experience, which our Technical SEO team immediately started addressing. However, another part of that algorithm update emphasized content freshness and helpfulness. In other words, how cutting-edge and useful our content is to our readers. This is where we really felt a sense of urgency. Because we had 4,000 URLs with published dates ranging from 2006 to 2015, we already knew that this chunk of content was not fresh or helpful. So, we got to work and audited those blog posts over the course of ten weeks. Eventually, we added phases two and three to our plan so we could further address unhelpful content and clusters. How We Audited Our Oldest Content 1. Define our goals. Before we started auditing the content, it was important for us to determine the objectives. For some publishers, the goal of a content audit may include improving on-page SEO, enhancing user engagement, aligning content with marketing goals, or identifying content gaps. For this particular audit, it meant uncovering “greenspace” and “quasi-greenspace” in our blog library, and improving our overall content freshness. We also had to determine the scope of our audit. There’s no right or wrong way to approach this. Depending on your goals and the size of your website, you could audit the whole thing in one go. You could also start with a small portion of your site (such as product pages or specific topic clusters) and build out from there. Since HubSpot has such a large content library, we opted to limit this audit to our oldest 4,000 URLs. Not only was this more manageable than reviewing all of our content in one audit, but this also targeted URLs that were more likely to benefit from an update or prune. We also did this knowing that we would later address the rest of our library during phases two and three. 2. Gather our content inventory. Once we established our goals and scope, we had to gather the oldest 4,000 blog posts and put them into a spreadsheet. This process can vary depending on the tools and CMS you use. Here’s how we did it using Content Hub: 1. Log into HubSpot and navigate to the Blog page in Content Hub. 2. Navigate to the Actions drop-down and click Export blog posts. 3. Select File format and click Export. This will send all of your blog post information to your email. You will also get a notification in HubSpot once your export is ready. 4. Download your export and open it in your preferred spreadsheet software (I’m usually a Google Sheets girlie, but I had to use Microsoft Excel since the file was so large). 5. Review each column in the spreadsheet and delete the ones that are not relevant to your audit. We immediately deleted the following: Post SEO title Meta description Last modified date Post body Featured image URL Head HTML Archived 6. Once the irrelevant columns were removed, the following remained: Blog name Post title Tags Post language Post URL Author Publish date Status 7. Filter the Post language column for EN posts only. Delete the column once the sheet is filtered. 8. Filter the Status column for PUBLISHED only. Delete the column once the sheet is filtered. 9. Filter the sheet by Publish date from oldest to newest. 10. Highlight and copy the first 4,000 rows and paste them into a separate spreadsheet. 11. Name the new spreadsheet Content Audit Master. If you’re feeling fancy, you can also create a custom report in Content Hub and select only the fields you want included in the audit so you don’t have to filter as much when setting up your spreadsheet. 3. Retrieve the data. After compiling all of the content needed for our audit, we had to collect relevant data for each blog post. For this audit, we