How Content Audits Help The HubSpot Blog Age Backwards — A Peek Into Our Process | International Association of Digital Marketing Professionals (IADMP)

By ahuffman@hubspot.com (Amanda Huffman)

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In 2023, my team and I began working on perhaps one of the most ambitious content audits ever conducted on the HubSpot Blog. We’ve run content audits in the past — but not like this.

We ran the audit in three phases:

Phase 1 addressed our oldest content.
Phase 2 evaluated our lowest-performing content.
Phase 3 assessed the value of our topic clusters.

When it was all said and done, we audited over 10,000 blog post URLs and over 450 topic clusters.

In this post, I’m going to focus on phase one of our audit. I’ll walk you through how we audited our oldest content and how we took action. Plus, I’ll share the results we found.

But first, let me give you some background on why we decided to run an audit of this magnitude.

Why We Audited

It all started in early 2023. At the time, my team was called the Historical Optimization team and we sat at the intersection of HubSpot’s SEO and Blog teams.

We were responsible for updating and optimizing our existing blog posts and finding growth opportunities within our library. (We’ve since evolved into what is now the EN Blog Strategy team.)

In case you’re new here, the HubSpot Blog is HUGE.

For context, the blog was home to 13,822 pages in February of 2023, the month we began our audit.

While we are fortunate to have a high domain authority and drive millions of visits per month, having a blog of this size does not come without challenges.

As our library ages, the amount of opportunity for new content across our blog properties and clusters shrinks.

So, we decided to audit our library to find opportunities for optimization.

We hypothesized that we could uncover “greenspace” and “quasi-greenspace” — topics that we have covered but haven’t capitalized on that well — by auditing the oldest 4,000 URLs in our library.

Although this was only about a third of our content library, we believed we’d be able to unearth some traffic opportunities and give our blog a boost.

Around the same time, we started to feel the effects of Google’s March 2023 Core Update that emphasized experience, which our Technical SEO team immediately started addressing.

However, another part of that algorithm update emphasized content freshness and helpfulness. In other words, how cutting-edge and useful our content is to our readers.

This is where we really felt a sense of urgency.

Because we had 4,000 URLs with published dates ranging from 2006 to 2015, we already knew that this chunk of content was not fresh or helpful.

So, we got to work and audited those blog posts over the course of ten weeks.

Eventually, we added phases two and three to our plan so we could further address unhelpful content and clusters.