The Unexpected Joys of Digging Into a Client's SEO
There's a certain kind of surprise that comes with inheriting a client's SEO history. You open up the analytics, pull up Google Search Console, start crawling through old content, and then — somewhere between the service pages and the contact form — you find it. A blog post about the best Pokémon GO spots in town. Written in 2016. Still indexed. Still pulling in the occasional confused visitor who just wants to catch a Snorlax near the town square.
And you have to stop and laugh.
This is one of those parts of the job nobody really talks about in SEO strategy meetings or conference keynotes. But it happens more than you'd think, and honestly? It's one of the more humanizing parts of the work. When you dig deep into a client's content history, you're not just doing an audit — you're doing archaeology. You're sifting through years of decisions made by different people, under different leadership, chasing different trends, during different moments in internet culture. And sometimes what you unearth is a little strange, a little funny, and occasionally kind of brilliant in a weird way.
The Pokémon GO post is just one example. We've seen blog content about Ice Bucket Challenge fundraising tie-ins. We've seen "Why Your Business Should Be on Vine" articles. We've seen listicles built entirely around trends that had a six-week cultural lifespan and then vanished without a trace. Every one of them is a snapshot of a moment in time when someone — a business owner, a marketing coordinator, a well-meaning web guy — made a call and hit publish.
The Conversation That Follows Is Always Interesting
Once you find something like this, you have a choice to make. And it almost always leads to one of the more entertaining conversations you'll have with a client during the engagement.
"So… you have a Pokémon GO article."
"Oh yeah, my old web guy thought it was a great idea at the time. Everyone was doing it."
"It's actually still getting some traffic."
"Wait — seriously? People are still searching for that?"
"A handful. Not a lot, but it's not zero."
And then begins the real discussion. Do we keep it? Do we trim it down? Do we redirect it to something more relevant? Is this page actually serving anyone who lands on it, or is it a relic sitting in the crawl budget like an old couch nobody wants to move out of the garage?
The answer isn't always obvious, and that's what makes these conversations genuinely interesting rather than just a quick delete and move on. Sometimes a piece of content that feels completely irrelevant on the surface is quietly doing something useful underneath. It might be holding onto a long-tail keyword that still gets occasional searches. It might have a few inbound links from local websites or community pages that were built around the same trend. It might be generating just enough engagement signals that cutting it clean could actually cause a small dip before things stabilize.
Other times, it's genuinely dead weight — a craze that came, peaked in three months, and took every last bit of its search volume with it when it left. In those cases, the content isn't just unhelpful, it might actually be part of a larger problem dragging the site down.
Why Old Content Is More Complicated Than It Looks
Here's something that surprises a lot of business owners when we get into the weeds of an SEO audit: having more content is not the same as having better SEO. In fact, a website full of outdated, thin, or irrelevant content can actively work against you.
Google's algorithms have gotten increasingly good at evaluating the overall quality of a website — not just individual pages in isolation. When crawlers work through your site and encounter page after page of posts that have no search volume, no engagement, no backlinks, and no relevance to what your business actually does, that creates a signal. It's not a catastrophic one, but it adds up. A site that feels scattered and unfocused to a crawler is going to have a harder time establishing authority in the areas that actually matter to the business.
There's also a more practical concern: crawl budget. Search engines don't have unlimited resources to crawl every page on every website every day. Larger sites with lots of low-value pages can end up in situations where crawlers are spending time on the old Pokémon GO post instead of the new service page that actually needs to be indexed. It sounds almost too simple to be true, but it's a real factor — especially for small and mid-sized business websites that have been around for a while and accumulated years of content without much curation.
And then there's the user experience angle. When someone lands on an outdated post through an organic search, what happens next? If the content has nothing to do with their actual intent, or if it's clearly stale and irrelevant, they bounce immediately. High bounce rates on content pages aren't always a death knell, but patterns of it across a site tell a story that the data will eventually reflect.
The Art of Deciding What Stays and What Goes
This is where a content audit stops being just a checklist exercise and starts requiring real judgment. There's no universal formula for what to keep and what to cut — it depends on the site, the industry, the competition, and sometimes just how much history there is to work through.
Generally speaking, when we're evaluating old or questionable content, we're asking a few core questions:
Is it getting any meaningful traffic? Not every page needs to be a traffic driver, but if a piece of content has received fewer than a handful of clicks over the past twelve months, it's worth asking what purpose it's serving.
Does it have any backlinks? Even a dated post can have value if it's accumulated links over the years. Cutting it without redirecting could mean losing whatever link equity those pages were passing along — a mistake that's easy to make and annoying to diagnose later.
Is it topically relevant to the business? A plumber doesn't need a post about the best Pokémon GO spots in their city. A local tourism board might actually have a case for keeping something like that, depending on the context.
Could it be updated and made useful again? Sometimes the answer isn't to delete but to repurpose. A post about a local trend might be salvageable if it's rewritten to focus on something evergreen — neighborhood guides, local events coverage, community spotlights — content that has longer legs and actually serves the people searching for it.
What does the data actually say? Gut feelings are a starting point, but the data tells the real story. Time on page, bounce rate, click-through rate from search, keyword rankings — all of it paints a picture that's worth sitting with before making a call.
The Bigger Picture: Content Strategy as an Ongoing Practice
The reason these audits turn up things like old Pokémon GO posts is because, for a lot of small businesses, content strategy was never really a strategy at all. It was a series of reactive decisions — publish something when there's news, jump on a trend when it feels timely, hire someone to write a few blog posts and then forget about the blog for eighteen months. That's not a criticism. Running a business is hard, and content marketing is one of those things that consistently falls to the bottom of the priority list when things get busy.
But those decisions accumulate. Over five or ten years, a business website can end up with dozens or even hundreds of posts that range from genuinely useful to completely irrelevant to actively confusing for both users and search engines. The site starts to feel unfocused. The SEO doesn't reflect what the business actually does. And the content that should be working hardest — the service pages, the location pages, the cornerstone content — gets buried under years of digital clutter.
A content audit is essentially a reset. It's a chance to look at everything that's been published, make deliberate decisions about what belongs and what doesn't, and build a foundation that's actually aligned with where the business is going — not where it was in 2016 when Pokémon GO was briefly the most downloaded app in the world.
Why We Actually Enjoy This Part of the Work
It might sound tedious, and some of it genuinely is. Crawling through hundreds of URLs, cross-referencing analytics data, building out a content inventory — it's not the most glamorous part of SEO. But there's something satisfying about bringing order to the chaos, and there's something genuinely fun about the moments when the chaos makes you laugh.
Finding that Pokémon GO post is a reminder that behind every website is a real business run by real people who were trying their best at the time with the information and resources they had. The web guy who suggested it wasn't wrong to think local content with a timely hook was a good idea. He was working with conventional wisdom that made sense in the moment. The trend just didn't last, and the content was never revisited.
That's not a failure — that's just how it goes. The goal now is to look at all of it with fresh eyes, make smart decisions, and build something that doesn't rely on the next fleeting craze to drive traffic.
Although, for the record, if Pokémon GO ever has a genuine resurgence, we'll be the first ones to tell you to dust off that old post and update it.
Ritner Digital specializes in honest, thorough SEO work for businesses that want real results — not quick fixes or trend-chasing. If your site is overdue for a content audit, or you just want to know what's actually hiding in your analytics, reach out. We promise to tell you about the Pokémon GO posts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is a content audit and do I actually need one?
A content audit is a systematic review of every piece of content on your website — blog posts, service pages, landing pages, all of it. The goal is to evaluate what's working, what's outdated, and what might actually be hurting your SEO without you realizing it. If your website has been around for more than a couple of years and content has been added sporadically over time without much of a plan, then yes — you probably need one. Most businesses that come to us for an audit are surprised by what's in there.
How does old or irrelevant content hurt my SEO?
Google evaluates your website as a whole, not just page by page. When a significant portion of your content is thin, outdated, or completely unrelated to what your business does, it dilutes your overall topical authority. It also wastes crawl budget — the resources search engines allocate to indexing your site — which can mean your most important pages get less attention than they deserve. The short version: quality matters more than quantity, and clutter costs you.
Should I just delete old blog posts that aren't getting traffic?
Not necessarily, and this is exactly why a thoughtful audit matters more than a mass deletion. Before removing any page, you need to check whether it has backlinks pointing to it, whether it's getting any organic traffic at all, and whether the content could be updated or consolidated into something more useful. Deleting pages without a redirect strategy can cause you to lose link equity you didn't even know you had. Every decision should be made with data, not just a gut feeling.
What happens to the SEO value of a page I delete?
If you delete a page and don't redirect it, that page essentially becomes a dead end. Anyone who had it bookmarked gets a 404 error, and any link equity it had built up evaporates. The right move in most cases is to set up a 301 redirect — a permanent redirect that sends visitors and search engines to the most relevant existing page. That way you're preserving as much value as possible even as you clean things up.
What if I have a post that was written around a trend — like Pokémon GO — but it still gets a little traffic?
This is genuinely a case-by-case call. A small amount of traffic isn't automatically a reason to keep something, but it's a reason to look closer before making a decision. We'd want to know where that traffic is coming from, what those visitors do when they land on the page, and whether there's a way to update or redirect the content toward something more relevant. Sometimes the smartest move is a redirect. Sometimes the content can be refreshed into something with longer legs. And sometimes it really is just time to let it go.
How often should a business be doing content audits?
For most small to mid-sized businesses, a thorough content audit once a year is a reasonable cadence. If you're publishing content frequently or your industry changes quickly, you might want to do a lighter review every six months. The goal isn't to be constantly second-guessing your content — it's to make sure that what you've built over time is still aligned with your business goals and is actually serving the people you're trying to reach.
Can outdated content on my site affect my newer pages?
Yes, it can. Search engines look at your site's overall quality and relevance when determining how much authority to assign individual pages. A site that's well-organized, topically focused, and filled with useful content is going to have an easier time ranking new pages than one that's cluttered with years of unfocused posts. Cleaning up old content is one of the less obvious ways to give your best pages a better shot at ranking well.
Is a content audit the same as a technical SEO audit?
No, though the two often overlap. A technical SEO audit focuses on the behind-the-scenes factors that affect how search engines crawl and index your site — things like site speed, mobile usability, broken links, structured data, and crawl errors. A content audit is specifically focused on the pages and posts themselves — their quality, relevance, and strategic value. Both matter, and ideally you're doing both, but they're distinct processes that look at different aspects of your site's health.
How long does a content audit take?
It depends entirely on the size of the site and how much content has accumulated over the years. A smaller business website with fifty or sixty pages might take a few days to audit properly. A site with several hundred posts and pages can take considerably longer, especially when you factor in the time needed to cross-reference analytics data, check backlinks, and make recommendations for every piece of content. It's one of those processes where rushing it leads to bad decisions, so we don't.
How do I get started with Ritner Digital?
Reach out and tell us a little about your site and what you're hoping to accomplish. We'll take a look at where things stand and talk through what makes sense for your specific situation — whether that's a full content audit, a broader SEO strategy, or just a conversation about what's actually going on with your rankings. No pressure, no hard sell. Just honest answers.