Content You Published and Did Not Need

Review the output, not the site

A site-wide content audit is a large job that gets postponed indefinitely.

Reviewing one year of your own output is an hour, and it answers the question that actually matters: was any of this worth the time.

Most businesses have never done it, which is why the same kind of content gets produced year after year regardless of what it achieves.

So this is an assessment of a habit rather than a tidy-up of a website.

Build the table

• Every piece you published this year.
• Visits since it went up.
• Any enquiry you can attribute.
• Roughly how long it took to make.
• Whether it needs maintaining.

The fourth column is the one that changes the conclusion. A page that took four hours and produced nothing is a different item from one that took twenty minutes and produced nothing.

Expect a very uneven distribution

Which is the normal finding rather than a failure.

Two or three items will account for most of the traffic, a handful will have produced something, and the majority will have done nothing measurable.

That is the shape for almost every small business and it is the same shape at large ones.

The mistake is concluding that publishing does not work, when the correct conclusion is that most attempts do not and some do.

The purpose of the review is to find out which kind you are capable of producing.

You cannot know in advance, which is the argument for continuing rather than stopping.

A worked example

A business published twenty-eight things across the year.

Three accounted for about seventy per cent of the traffic, all three were answers to specific practical questions customers ask, and all three took under an hour to write.

Nine were company news, which between them had a hundred and forty visits, most of those in the week each went up.

The rest were general articles about their industry that had done nothing at all.

The following year they wrote twelve things, all answers to questions, and produced more traffic than the twenty-eight had.

The review took ninety minutes and halved the workload.

The pattern is almost always the same

Which is worth knowing before you start.

What works is specific answers to questions people actually ask, written plainly, containing details only you would know.

What does not work is company news, general commentary on your industry, and anything written because the schedule required something.

Your own table will show this rather than an opinion, which is why the exercise is worth doing rather than simply being told.

The evidence from your own site is what changes behaviour.

Deleting is rarely the answer

Which distinguishes this from a general prune.

A page that produced nothing is costing you nothing either, unless it is wrong, out of date, or actively misleading.

So the output of this review is a decision about next year's writing rather than a deletion list.

The exceptions are worth removing: anything factually out of date, anything referring to a service you no longer offer, and anything with a date in it that has passed.

Those three categories do harm and everything else is merely inert.

Inert is entirely fine and costs nothing at all to leave alone.

Spend the effort on next year's writing rather than on tidying last year's.

Count the time honestly

Which is what makes the conclusion actionable.

Twenty-eight pieces at two hours each is a working fortnight, which is a substantial investment for a small business.

Set against three pieces that produced results, the question is not whether to publish but whether to publish the other twenty-five.

Doing twelve things well is both less work and more effective, which is an unusual combination and is the normal outcome of this exercise.

Most businesses find they can halve the volume and improve the result.

Turn the review into next year's list

Which is the useful ending.

Take the three that worked and ask what they have in common, then write a list of ten more of that kind.

Sources for that list: questions in your inbox, terms people searched to reach you, and things your staff explain repeatedly.

That is a year's plan derived from evidence rather than from a content calendar template.

Write that list in the same hour, while the table is still in front of you.

Check whether the good ones are still correct

Which is the maintenance half and is worth more than writing anything new.

The two or three pieces carrying most of your traffic are the ones people are actually reading, so an out-of-date price, a changed process, or a superseded recommendation in one of those does real damage.

Read each of them properly rather than skimming, as a customer would, and correct anything that has drifted since it was written.

An hour spent on the pages that work is worth considerably more than an hour spent producing another one that will not.

Put that check in the calendar annually, since these pages tend to keep working for years and nobody ever reopens them.

The counter-case

Some content is not for traffic.

A page that exists so you can send it to a customer, a policy, or something that closes a sale in a conversation is doing a job no visit count will show.

Traffic also accumulates slowly, so a piece published in October has not had time to demonstrate anything.

And attributing an enquiry to a specific page is approximate at best, so that column should be read loosely rather than treated as a measurement.

The traffic column is the reliable one.

List the year's output with traffic and time taken, find the two or three that worked, and write next year's list from what they have in common.

What to do

1. List everything published this year.
2. Add visits and time taken.
3. Find the two or three that worked.
4. Ask what they share.
5. Delete only what is wrong.
6. Count the total hours.
7. Write ten more of the good kind.

Step six is what makes the finding act on you, since twenty-eight pieces at two hours each is a working fortnight spent, and seeing that figure beside the results changes next year's plan.

The whole-site version is covered in which pages earned their place.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.