In the summer of 2024 I had over 100 posts live on the blog on my website.
When I first started my business back in 2018 and I didn’t have as much work coming in, I spent most of my days creating content for my blog. At one point I was publishing two posts a week which is how I ended up filling my blog with so much content.
I made it my priority to create content for my blog, a platform I actually own, in order to capitalise on organic traffic from search engines like Google. Creating and publishing blog content is very time-consuming, but if you create high quality, relevant content, the hard work truly pays off and you can reap the benefits for many years to come. That’s why I love SEO!
Publishing content to my blog consistently in the early days was totally worth the effort as it drove a lot of traffic to my website. In fact, many of the blog posts I wrote in my first year of business still drive traffic to my website to this day.
But then last summer, as I prepared to take my business through a rebrand and rebuild my website, I decided to make some changes to my blog. I decided to remove a huge chunk of posts from my blog; over 75% to be exact.
Now, that’s a lot of content! And I’m going to be completely honest here; it was very scary to make this decision. But let me explain why I went ahead and made this choice.
Not all website traffic is good or beneficial…
Something that I’ve learned over the years is just because content is driving traffic to your website, doesn’t mean it’s driving the right people.
I started to realise that the people who are finding my blog posts through search engines weren’t my target audience for my business. They were usually people who were DIYing their own websites or they’re fellow developers looking for specific WordPress related tutorials, which is what made up the majority of my blog’s content.
My content wasn’t attracting the type of people I really wanted to attract, i.e. web designers who were looking to outsource the development of their WordPress websites.
And while it was satisfying to look at my analytics and see lots of traffic coming to my website via these blog posts, it all feels a bit pointless when those visitors weren’t actually interested in my services or offerings.
High traffic but high bounce and low conversion rates
In addition, when we look at our analytics, we need to look beyond the number of people who are clicking through to our website. We have to look at things like bounce rate and conversion rates, because this information allows us to see the bigger picture.
My traffic might have been high but my bounce rate was also high because visitors were leaving once they’d got the answer to their question. There was no real incentive to look at what else I do in my business and this results in very low conversion rates.
There was also another reason why I’m removing these posts…
Tech tutorial blog posts become outdated very quickly!
A lot of the blog posts I wrote in the early days of my business were tech tutorials. I was mainly teaching people how to use WordPress and build websites.
And again, the problem with this is it was attracting the wrong type of people to my website and my business. While I’m sure I attracted a few web designers who were looking for answers to their technical WordPress questions, they definitely didn’t account for the bulk of my website traffic.
But the real problem with tech tutorials is that they have a very short life span.
Software is constantly changing and evolving, and so tech tutorials quickly become out of date. I’m sure you’ve found a tech tutorial via Google only to realise that the steps and screenshots in that tutorial don’t match what you’re seeing in the software. It’s incredibly frustrating!
I remember once writing a tutorial for a blog post and within 3 days of publishing it, it was out of date as the software I was writing about had a massive overhaul. I immediately had to spend hours rewriting to bring it up to date, only for it to be once again out of date a few months later.
The majority of the posts on my blog in the summer of 2024 were out of date. I would need to have spent a lot of time going back over these posts and rewriting them to bring them up to date. And unfortunately I realised that it just wasn’t worth my time updating these posts, especially when they weren’t attracting the right people to my website in the first place. I would rather spend my time creating new content that will attract the right people.
Deleting old blog posts felt scary…
The decision to remove so much content from my blog was not an easy one to make and it felt so scary. After all, this content was successfully driving visitors to my website, and I knew that by removing it, I was going to see a huge drop in traffic when I checked my website’s analytics.
I’ve kept reminding myself that there’s no point in getting eyes on my website if they aren’t the right kind of eyes. And while my analytics did show a massive drop in traffic once I removed these posts, I can see that the number of visitors to my website are on the rise again now that I am publishing more relevant and helpful content that’s actually up to date.
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