Decide what to keep: Inventory and valuation
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 5:32 am
Zooming out for a second to look at it from a higher level: If you've already decided that investing in blog content is worth it for your company, it's about making the most of your existing resources and making sure they're not holding you back.
Inventory
The first thing to do before accessing your blog posts is to make sure you know what you have. A complete list of URLs and coordinating metadata is incredibly helpful for both reviewing and documenting.
Depending on the content management system you use, obtaining this list may be as simple as exporting a database field. Alternatively, URLs can be obtained from Google Analytics data, Webmaster Tools, usa number data a comprehensive crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog. This post provides a good outline of how to get the data you need from these sources.
Regardless of whether you have a list of URLs yet, it's also a good idea to do a full crawl of your blog to see what the linking structure looks like at this point, and how it might differ from what you see in your CMS.
Diagnosis
Once you know what you have, it's time to evaluate the content and decide if it's worth keeping. When I do this, I like to ask these 5 questions:
Inventory
The first thing to do before accessing your blog posts is to make sure you know what you have. A complete list of URLs and coordinating metadata is incredibly helpful for both reviewing and documenting.
Depending on the content management system you use, obtaining this list may be as simple as exporting a database field. Alternatively, URLs can be obtained from Google Analytics data, Webmaster Tools, usa number data a comprehensive crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog. This post provides a good outline of how to get the data you need from these sources.
Regardless of whether you have a list of URLs yet, it's also a good idea to do a full crawl of your blog to see what the linking structure looks like at this point, and how it might differ from what you see in your CMS.
Diagnosis
Once you know what you have, it's time to evaluate the content and decide if it's worth keeping. When I do this, I like to ask these 5 questions: