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Ever wonder if you should delete old content or just let it live on for eternity? I have heard people say you should never delete old content, which is just not true. Part of any good content strategy should be performing a ROT analysis on your content set. This includes content on your website or social networks, such as Instagram.
What is a ROT analysis?
A ROT analysis helps identify either Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial content – these will be the buckets. Organizing your website content into these buckets will allow you to further analyze your content sets based on data and insights. The results from the analysis will lead to either deleting the content, rewriting it entirely, or refreshing it and republishing it.
A ROT analysis should be done every six months to keep your content fresh and relevant.
Why Perform a ROT Analysis for SEO?
To Positively Impact Website Crawl Budget For SEO
Google has often mentioned the term “crawl budget.” This term means that, in theory, a website has a defined amount of value (IMO, based on the authority and inbound links). That value can support a specific number of pages of content. The more content a website has, the less value each piece gets. Thus, removing or consolidating ROT content will help the best articles get crawled and get the most value.
To Prune Outdated Content
Few things annoy users more than clicking on a search result they think is timely content and finding it years old. This can be due to an old product, an old event, or just an old article with data or content claims that are no longer valid.
To Refocus SEO Keywords
There are a couple of reasons you might want to rewrite an article. One of the primary reasons is that the keyword set that was initially targeted does not represent current vernacular or trends.
Consolidate Near Duplicate Content
Over time, you will most likely write a ton of articles, and there may be a few that cover similar topics. These articles can be consolidated into a single report to help build a more inclusive long-form piece of content and focus value.
Quick note: If you consolidate two or more pieces of content, make sure you 301 redirect the old URLs to the primary URL you use.
Delete Outdated Content
There are many reasons for abandoning a piece of content and just deleting it altogether. These reasons can be: it’s an old event, an old news topic that is irrelevant, or maybe your views or the information about the case is no longer correct.
Quick note: If you delete a piece of content, make sure you 301 redirect the old URL to a similar article or to the category of that article.
How to do a ROT Analysis
Step 1:
A ROT analysis starts by defining the goals and criteria for your content analysis and what you’ll define as trivial. For example, will the audit criteria be based on traffic, sales, brand value, social shares, etc.?
- If your website is built to drive advertising dollars, you’ll probably want to set the primary criteria based on traffic and page views and the secondary criteria on social shares.
- If you’re an eCommerce website, you’ll probably want to focus on conversions first. This will ensure you don’t delete a piece of content that converts quickly but does not drive much traffic.
Step 2:
Once you have your goal and criteria outlined, you’ll want to export a complete list of your pages and the data points needed to analyze the content from your Google Analytics program.
One thing to note: if you publish content frequently, you’ll probably want to exclude the current month from this data pull. Recently published articles may not have enough data to provide statistically valid insights.
Step 3:
Once you have the data pulled, there are a few questions you will want to ask yourself about the data set.
- Are there articles covering similar or redundant topics that can be consolidated?
- Are there outdated articles, such as events or timely content, that should be deleted or rewritten to make them relevant?
- Are there articles that don’t meet the minimum Google or user requirements (trivial) and should either be deleted or rewritten?