An underperforming blog post isn’t just a waste of the time and resources it took to produce it. It’s quietly tanking your SEO – and that’s costing you real sales.
We see it all the time: website content created with the best intentions, now sabotaging an otherwise good SEO strategy. Not because it’s badly written, off-brand or even boring, but because it’s outdated, irrelevant, and simply not doing what good content is meant to do.
At PH Digital, we call this content hoarding. And like those bulky old coats taking up space in your wardrobe or the mess of mismatched tupperware under the sink, it creates chaos, confusion, and costly inefficiencies.
Content Hoarding Isn’t Harmless. It’s Expensive.
Outdated or irrelevant blog posts don’t just sit there. They dilute your authority, confuse search engines, and crowd out the content that actually converts.
A piece of thought leadership that doesn’t align with your audience’s needs? A Christmas sign-off from three years ago, complete with grainy pics of team members you don’t recognise? An illustrated guide to your store’s Covid-era click-and-collect policy?
These posts are serving no purpose, and potentially costing you business.
We recently worked with a client who had a library of hundreds of live articles, built up over several years. After a content audit, we removed over 100 posts. The dip in traffic? Less than half a percent. And on the flip-side, they gained stronger rankings across key service pages, a cleaner internal link structure, and better crawl efficiency.
This is the power of a content spring clean – not just culling, but clearing the way forward.
Do Blogs Still Matter?
Done well, blog content remains one of the most effective ways to build search visibility and topical authority. In today’s AI-driven search landscape, blogs are also helping to power the summaries users see first in their search results.
Crucial for clicks and an indirect driver of conversions, blogs are an important cog in your SEO content machine. But too many brands are still publishing them without a strategy – churning out posts to meet arbitrary weekly deadlines, and missing the whole point of the exercise.
Blogging today isn’t about volume, it’s about focus. If your content isn’t useful, aligned with what your audience is actually searching, or clearly connected to your commercial goals, it’s not helping your SEO.
What to Keep vs What to Cull
Content worth keeping is the content that’s still earning its keep by being relevant, discoverable, and tied to your business objectives.
Read your blog like your customer would. Does it speak to real questions or challenges? Does it connect to what you sell? Does it guide the reader somewhere worth going?
A content spring clean is about making space for what matters. Every post on your site should be there for a reason – and that reason should be measurable. If a post is no longer connected to your current services, doesn’t rank, and isn’t earning any clicks or engagement, you have two options: retire, or repurpose.
Consider that even small changes like rewriting a headline for clarity, updating a call-to-action, or removing irrelevant sections can turn a redundant post into one that actually works. And once you start, patterns will emerge. You’ll see where the gaps are, what themes are overcooked, and where you’re leaving traffic on the table.
Calling in the Experts
At PH Digital, we approach SEO content like we do paid performance: strategically, systematically, and with commercial outcomes in mind. We don’t just create blog content. We audit, rework, remove, and optimise it as part of a broader strategy that supports your business goals.
For one beauty brand, this approach delivered a 176% increase in organic traffic in just three months. Not through endless publishing, but through focus, clarity, and a strategy grounded in what customers actually search for.
If your blog is bloated, underperforming, or simply out of sync with how people search today, we can help.
Reach out to us today for a free SEO audit, and let’s turn your content into a competitive advantage.