The 340-Post Blog That Sells the Old Product
Brightwell is a B2B scheduling SaaS sold to dental practices with 2–15 chairs. Its blog holds 340 posts published over five years by three different agencies. Organic sessions are down 22% year over year, and the sales team complains that inbound leads ask questions the blog already answers - about pricing tiers and features that were replaced 14 months ago. In the last 90 days, 12 posts produced 61% of blog sessions and 78% of blog-sourced demo requests. Another 148 posts logged fewer than 10 sessions each. Thirty-one posts describe the old pricing model. The content team is one writer and one part-time editor, about six publishable pieces a month including updates. The VP of Marketing wants a plan for next quarter and has asked one question: should the blog be pruned, consolidated, or left alone while the team produces new bottom-of-funnel content?
1. The VP wants one quarter of work from a two-person team. Segment the 340 posts and sequence the next 12 weeks. Explain the order of operations.
Read the worked answer
Segment before you sequence. Four buckets, built from data already in hand:
- Revenue core (12 posts, 61% of sessions, 78% of demo requests): protect and improve - refresh CTAs, internal links, screenshots. Also treat it as a risk: 12 URLs carrying most of the value is concentration risk, so the quarter should reduce dependence on them.
- Inaccurate (31 posts): highest urgency, not because of traffic but because they contradict the product and cost sales calls. Trust damage compounds monthly.
- Striking distance (pages ranking roughly 4–15 on queries with real impressions): best effort-to-return. Moving position 11 to 4 roughly doubles CTR on the same impressions without writing anything new.
- Dead weight (148 posts under 10 sessions): do not delete on the traffic number alone. Check backlinks and assisted conversions first.
Sequence:
- Weeks 1–2: the 31 outdated posts. Existing assets, immediate credibility win, closes the sales complaint.
- Weeks 3–7: striking-distance pages - title, intro, updated examples, internal links from the revenue core into them.
- Weeks 8–12: consolidate dead weight into 4–5 hub pages with 301s, and publish two bottom-funnel pieces (pricing explainer, migration/comparison guide) because the VP asked and they are cheap.
Order matters: pruning before you know which pages pass link equity is irreversible, and consolidation without a hub plan just relocates 404s. Fix what misleads and what is closest to page one before adding volume a two-person team cannot sustain.
2. For the 31 posts about the replaced pricing model, what do you do with each - update, redirect, delete, or leave? What risks do you accept?
Read the worked answer
Triage each URL on two axes: does the topic still exist in the product, and does the URL carry value (backlinks, organic entries, email links, sales collateral)?
- Topic exists, page has links or traffic → update in place, keep the URL. Rewrite pricing and features, add a visible updated date and a one-line changelog. Preserves equity and rankings; the URL is an asset.
- Topic retired, page has backlinks or organic entries → 301 to the closest current page (new pricing page, successor feature), but merge any unique content into the target first. Never mass-redirect to the homepage - Google treats that as a soft 404 and passes little value.
- Topic retired, no links, no entrants → 410 is defensible; it clears the index faster than 404. Verify referring domains before you decide, because zero sessions does not mean zero links.
- Posts that duplicate each other → consolidate into one and redirect the rest.
Risks you accept: short-term ranking dips on redirected URLs (usually recover in 4–8 weeks); dead email and social links (mitigated by redirects, not by deletion); sales still circulating old PDFs and screenshots that link to retired pages (tell them explicitly).
Governance fix so this does not recur in 14 months: one canonical pricing page that is updated, not 31 posts that each restate pricing. Assign an owner and a twice-yearly freshness review.
3. How will you show in 90 days whether the audit worked, and what result would tell you it failed?
Read the worked answer
Baseline before touching anything: the 90 days pre-work, per URL, for sessions, demo requests, average position on target queries, and referring domains. Compare the same URL set afterward, not site totals, so paid campaigns and seasonality do not contaminate the read. Add a control group of 30 untouched posts with similar profiles - if they move as much as the treated posts, you measured the market, not your work.
Scorecard:
- Demo requests from updated and consolidated pages (primary), sessions (secondary).
- Concentration: top-12 share of blog sessions should fall from 61% toward roughly 45–50%, because other pages grew. If it stays flat, the team only refreshed the winners.
- Count of posts with zero sessions in the trailing 90 days (should fall).
- Position on striking-distance queries; impressions lead, clicks lag two to six weeks.
- Sales signal: fewer old-pricing objections, tagged on discovery calls.
Failure looks like: total sessions flat and demo requests from updated pages unchanged after eight weeks (the updates were cosmetic), or a step drop after redirects that has not recovered by week six (wrong redirect targets), or unchanged concentration. Do not judge at week two - recrawl and re-ranking take weeks, and a 90-day window with an eight-week read point is the honest minimum.