Pruning Your Content: A #CMWorld Twitter Chat with Christina Elghazi

You write content, publish it, distribute it. Then what happens? Months and then years pass. (Maybe even a decade?) And that amazing content you wrote ages ago is:

A) Out of date
B) Irrelevant for your evolved customer
C) Poorly written
D) All of the above

That’s when content pruning can help. Pruning can mean revising, republishing, revamping, combining and more. It could even mean deleting. But it’s not as simple as that, and there’s a lot of work to be done. So, we went right to the expert, Christina Elghazi, marketing director at The Search Agency. We knew she knew her stuff, but WOW, was this a great conversation. We broke out of our usual Twitter Moment format where we usually pull some of the responses from our guests and community, and this time we only included the tweets from Christina because they were so useful and tactical.

But, during our hour together, there were so many great tweets and insights from other smart marketers in the Twitter Moment so we wanted to offer up this Hashtracking link that includes tweets from the fast-paced hour. We hope you find it useful!

Below we’ve included a few great moments from the chat.

Let’s start from the top. How do you know it’s time for a content pruning?

A1. When your goals have changed.
When your services have changed
When your target audience has finally gotten hooked on specific types of content, products or services you provide#CMWorld

— SL Thomas (@iamslthomas) December 3, 2019

A1: When it’s too much for users to dig through to find what’s most important. When it’s too much for your (small) team to keep updated. When there are pieces that don’t get traffic or recirculate or move people along to conversion pages. (I’m working on this now, btw!) #CMWorld

— Jill Golden (@_goldengrams) December 3, 2019

A1:
You have outdated content.
Your priorities/products/services have changed.
You have any content that’s 3-6+ months old without having had a refresh.
You simply don’t have time to track/update/make the most of it all.
Lots of pages aren’t getting any traffic. #CMWorld

— Anna Simmonds (@AnnaDoesSocial) December 3, 2019

A1 [2/4]: Our goal as content marketers is to only serve @Google
content that is optimized, useful and relevant. Content that is low-quality, irrelevant, thin or outdated is likely either hurting you or doing nothing for you. #CMWorld

— Christina Elghazi (@tinatsa) December 3, 2019

OK…so you’re working on the pruning process, but how do you ensure that it’s helping site performance and customer experience?

Q5: That’s a good time to tap into the power of visuals: swap out your old ones, especially the header image. A new image helps ratify the pruning and new planting– makes ’em more “real”; don’t spoil it by pasting in some hopeless stock image that screams: Cringe! 😬 #CMWorld

— Mark Armstrong (@mrstrongarm) December 3, 2019

A5:
1. Don’t delete the existing content as there are changes for drop-in SERP of already ranking keywords
2. Add additional content to the page for the targeted keywords
3. Retain the internal links on the page intact#CMWorld

— Amar⚡ (@amartadi) December 3, 2019

A5 [3/5]: Update internal links to limit 4xx errors and unnecessary redirects. #CMWorld

— Christina Elghazi (@tinatsa) December 3, 2019

A5 [2/5]: Implement a 301 redirect to the closest version of the page or something topically relevant. A 301 redirect will pass 100% of PageRank only if the new page closely matches the topic of the old page. #CMWorld

— Christina Elghazi (@tinatsa) December 3, 2019

And lastly, you’ve completed the pruning process. Phew! Let’s not wait 10 years to do this again, OK? But in the meantime, what can we do from a process and workflow standpoint to make the pruning process more efficient when it’s time to do it again?

A7a: Use what you’ve learned to improve how you optimize, design, conceptualize, distribute, and promote content. Build in analysis & improvement into every campaign, and make necessary adjustments as needed. #CMWorld

— Annette Sugden (@Annette_Sugden) December 3, 2019

A7. One can never be impulsive with pruning.
I’ll continue to review my services, my current social media strategy as well as my targets. Once that has been reviewed and a new strategy for the year has been placed, then I can continue the pruning process. #CMWorld

— SL Thomas (@iamslthomas) December 3, 2019

A7 (1/3): Take note of patterns you observe in the performance data. Do certain topics require more maintenance than others? Does your long-form content outperform your listicles? Use your findings to inform your 2020 strategy. #CMWorld

— Christina Elghazi (@tinatsa) December 3, 2019

We’re going to end this post here because, quite frankly, you have some pruning to do. But seriously, Christina’s responses were amazing, so check out her responses on our Twitter Moment and then check out the full Hashtracking link to read more brilliance from our community. As always, you can follow the #CMWorld hashtag on Twitter to stay with us each and every day of the year.

You really should come hang with us when we have our #CMWorld Twitter Chat reunion, also known as Content Marketing World. If you can believe it, registration for next October is now open, and we’d love for you to get the best pricing before 12/31/19. We hope to see you then!