Confessions of a content hoarder: What 107 dead pages taught me

I was digging through the blog section of a fairly large lender client. Like a lot of lenders, they had accumulated more educational articles than anyone could reasonably keep track of. You know the formula: four articles a month for five or ten years, until you’ve built a massive library without stopping to ask whether anyone still needs most of it. Last quarter, of those 400+ articles, 107 earned zero clicks. Not declining traffic. Zero traffic. And these weren’t bad articles. Many still ranked, including one page that appeared in search more than 170,000 times last quarter and somehow managed to turn all that visibility into just 13 visits. That’s when this stopped looking like a content refresh project. If 107 articles can earn zero clicks while still ranking, are they all really worth saving? You probably don’t need half the content on your website Most marketers’ first reaction is to call it a content problem and think we need another round of optimization. Or worse, we create new content to make up for the lost traffic while leaving hundreds of old articles untouched, like museum pieces. Except the year-over-year data didn’t support that conclusion. For this lender, clicks f...