Turning Old Blogs into Content Hubs

When looking at our website in an audit, I saw that a lot of our newer blogs were not performing well, even when using the best SEO practices. The reason being, a lot of our older blogs are still ranking against our newer blogs, but our older blogs do not contain the most relevant information and have poor SEO practices.

This introduces our Keyword Cannibalization Project, a project that has a goal to fix the keyword cannibalization that our older blogs have against our newer blogs. Throughout this project, I updated older blogs from 2013-2017, and rewrote them into a long-form blog called a pillar page which fell under a large subtopic. Therefore, this pillar page contained updated information, but also took traffic from the older blogs which were now redirected to this page.

By result, website traffic increased 30%, and with each new pillar page filled with long-form, older blog content, website visits would spike. Here is the overall process.

Keyword cannibalization is the SEO concept where a website has too many identical or similar keywords, either throughout their blog, case studies, or resources. As a result, search engines are unable to discern which content can rank higher, so some organization's pages may be ranked higher than those they want to prioritize.

To avoid keyword cannibalization, I consolidated blog content that ranked under a certain keyword and rewrote it as a pillar page under a new topic. Afterwards, I redirected (301 redirect) those older blogs to the pillar page so that it will start receiving more website traffic.

To decide the pillar page topics, I used tools like Ubersuggests and AnswerthePublic which come up with keyword ideas and topics, like "What is two-factor authentication?"

Additionally, the topic would need to be related to the common keyword that many pieces of content are ranking for. So, if the common keyword was "two-factor authentication", then the topic above would suffice.

After gathering all of the blogs that ranked under a common keyword, I grabbed paragraphs from each blog that fell under the overarching topic. For example, a blog about two-factor authentication will include copy from older blogs that talk about two-factor authentication methods or two-factor authentication use cases.

Once the pillar page was drafted and published, I set up 301 redirects (permanent redirects) from the older blogs to the new pillar page.

Additionally, this was an opportunity to create SEO content hubs, where these pillar pages were used to link out to our other existing content, but did not cannibalize the keyword we were ranking for. For example, the pillar page about two-factor authentication now links to a page about multi-factor authentication and authentication methods.

These pages also link out to the two-factor authentication page, creating a SEO flywheel.

We check the results of each new pillar page after 6 months and have found the following results. For one, website traffic increases, for us, it was a contributing factor to our website visibility increasing 30%. For two, website traffic spikes within a week the pillar page is published, and pages are redirected.