Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
SEO for people who don't like SEO. I run an SEO agency. My wife Meredith is a family photographer. Our podcast explains how I got Meredith's website to the top of Google and answers questions from photographers about SEO and website marketing.
Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
How To Choose Blog Posts To Revise (for better SEO)
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This episode shows how to pick the best blog posts to rewrite for stronger SEO and AI search visibility using Google Search Console. You’ll use impressions to spot what Google already surfaces, avoid keyword cannibalization by consolidating overlapping posts, and turn recurring topics into content hubs instead of guessing what to write next.
Timestamps
[0:00] Introduction
[0:28] The goal: choose blogs to rewrite for AI + SEO visibility
[1:02] “Follow the breadcrumbs” using Google Search Console
[1:20] Why “blogging is good for SEO” is too vague to execute
[2:17] Why revisiting old posts is a core blogging skill
[3:58] Impressions explained (visibility beyond page one)
[4:45] Filter Search Console to view only blog page URLs
[5:01] Prioritize the posts with the most impressions
[5:46] Spotting keyword cannibalization in the Queries tab
[6:38] Consolidate posts + delete the weaker one + 301 redirect
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https://www.meredithshusband.com/podcast
Recap And Goal: AI Visibility
Meredith's HusbandDo you remember what we talked about last week?
MeredithNo.
Meredith's HusbandLast week.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandWe talked about improving your website's visibility in AI searches.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandA few tips. And I said it next week, which is now today.
MeredithHello.
Meredith's HusbandHow to identify which blogs are sort of the best options for rewriting to help with that visibility. Okay. AI and just general SEO.
MeredithThis is something you talked about. For some reason, this I remember.
Meredith's HusbandI have touched on this topic, yes.
MeredithOkay. Just want to make sure.
Meredith's HusbandPeople really seem to appreciate it though. So I'm going to just kind of be a little more
Why Rewriting Beats Only New Posts
Meredith's Husbandspecific here.
MeredithI appreciate that.
Meredith's HusbandSo what we're going to do is we're going to use Google Search Console.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandAnd we're just going to I call it following the breadcrumbs. It's really pretty easy. Like Google is kind of leaving breadcrumbs that you can identify if you're using Google Search Console. And you say, oh, that one's doing good. That one's doing good. That one's doing good. Hey, lo and behold, maybe this is what I should blog about.
MeredithYeah, maybe this is a house made of candy.
Meredith's HusbandBecause you've heard the advice. I've given the advice. It's pretty common advice, like blogging is good for SEO.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandEverybody, not everybody says that. That is said often, but it's pretty vague.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandLike that's pretty open to interpretation.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandBecause you could take that advice and you could go at least a few different directions with it. Some not so good.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandSo what we want to do is uh we want our blogging effort to be successful with SEO. We want it to do good. So effective. Yes. The most successful bloggers. And when I say successful bloggers, I mean people who start blogs and they end up like with six-figure businesses based on the blog or they sell the blog for millions of dollars or whatever. Like those are what I would call probably the most successful bloggers. But any blogging, if you want to be, you know, if you want your blog, your efforts on your blog to pay off, something you can do that I think is a whole lot easier. Because when most people hear, you know, oh, you got a blog for SEO, you think, what do you think?
MeredithUh, panic. What am I going to blog about?
Meredith's HusbandYeah, exactly. A new blog. Your mind goes to new blogs and what are you going to blog about, right? Correct. Yes. That's only part of having a successful blog is creating new blogs. A major part is redoing old blogs, looking to see what is performing well, what is not performing well. That will have that'll also that's easier to do than writing a new blog, if you ask me. It will also help inform you of what you need to write. You'll see what topics are doing well, what topics are not doing well. So my point is people who are successful with their blog are going to spend, I'm not going to say a majority, but a good chunk of their time blogging, revisiting old blogs.
MeredithGot it.
Meredith's HusbandGetting intelligence from Google, following those breadcrumbs, figuring out what to do moving forward. Because a lot of times what happens is people, they go, they might have a successful blog and they think, oh, well, that was successful. I'm going to do that again. And they end up blogging about the same thing over and over. That leads to a problem. Or what they do is they just they write a blog, whether it does well or not, they just leave it. It's fixed. They think, oh, that's doing well. I'm going to leave it as is. Okay. Those are those are both kind of problems. You don't really want to do either one of those. So what we're going to do is we're going to use Google Search Console and we're going to follow the breadcrumbs, like I said, and we're going to try to essentially go with the flow. Excellent. Whatever Google is doing, whatever Google is appreciating about your website, we want to go with that and we want to make that stronger and build upon that. We don't want to go against the flow. What is that swimming upstream? We don't want to swim upstream against Google because Google is a really strong current. You're not going to win that. So we want to identify what is Google like and we want to do more of that.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandOkay.
MeredithSo play nice with Google.
Meredith's HusbandIn doing that, we are going to use Google Search Console and we're going to look at the number of impressions. I've talked about impressions, I don't know, probably dozens of times. That's a good impression.
MeredithThank you.
Meredith's HusbandAnother impression is anytime Google shows your website to users.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandAnd that doesn't mean it has to be on page one. If somebody
Follow Impressions In Search Console
Meredith's Husbanddoes a search, Google generates 200 results, 20 pages of results. Okay. If your website is on page 20, that's still an impression. It's just that you're not on the on the first page. So this is how we can start to see trends like Google, oh, Google is picking this blog up, but it's it's still ranked fairly low. Maybe we should make it stronger, et cetera, et cetera. So the first thing that you want to do is look at your pages.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandGo to Google Search Console, look at your pages, and use a filter to just look at your blog pages. Hopefully your blog articles have the word blog in there, a URL somewhere. So you can do a filter for that. So you're only looking at a chart of your most popular blog pages.
MeredithOkay.
Meredith's HusbandThen you want to find the ones with the most impressions. Those are the ones that are doing the best.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandThose are the ones that we want to somehow make stronger. Now, couple, well, one thing to look out for. If you have, say, two blogs that are similar, okay. Maybe you blogged about the same thing twice. Happens, like I said, quite often.
MeredithTo the best of us.
Meredith's HusbandIf you have that situation and you see both of those blogs showing up in your say top 10 of most popular blogs, look to see what keywords are leading in what queries. Click on the queries tab. Look to see what queries are leading to those blog posts. If it's the same query or very, very similar, and there's two different pages appearing in search, that's not good. Want to do that.
MeredithNo.
Meredith's HusbandNarrow that down. That's called keyword cannibalization. It's actually going to be harming your rankings or it's going to be holding you back. It's going to be holding you back. So what you want to do, if you bind them? Yes. Well, that's one option, yes. What you want to do is you want to pick the one that is stronger, that's getting more impressions. Or when you're looking at Google Search Console, there's a knife, a knife, there's not a knife. There's a nice line graph that will show you trends. If one of them is trending up and the other is trending down, you want to use the one that's trending up in impressions, getting more, the one that's doing better. Then you so that's the one you want to keep, the one that's stronger or doing better. Then you want to combine them. Or if they're very similar, just get rid of one. Like Yeah, that was my question.
MeredithYou get rid of the least well performing one.
Meredith's HusbandYes. And think about before you do that, is could you combine them in some way?
MeredithRight.
Meredith's HusbandIs there something you can take from the one that
Fix Keyword Cannibalization With 301s
Meredith's Husbandis performing a little bit worse and add it to the one that's better? Then get rid of the one that is performing worse, delete it, and create a redirect. This is very important. You need to create a 301 redirect from the one you got rid of to the one that you're keeping.
MeredithAnd and do you do that before you get rid of it?
Meredith's HusbandJust do it at the same time.
MeredithAnd how do you do that?
Meredith's HusbandWell, I can't cover all the details here. But Google it or chat GPT at how do I create a 301 redirect on WordPress or Squarespace or wherever your website is.
MeredithGot it.
Meredith's HusbandIt's not very hard, but it it is an important step. Do not skip it. It's very, very for SEO. It's very, very, especially in this situation, very, very, very, very, very, very, very important.
MeredithI'm not going to make a joke.
Meredith's HusbandAnd you might have more than two. So I said you might have, you know, two different blogs kind of appearing for the same searches. You might have three or four or five. So same rule applies. Keep the one that is strongest. And I would say get rid of the others one at a time. Like, you know, you look at them, and if you can somehow combine them all into one, uh, do that, but don't feel you need to get rid of them all at once. I would say don't go crazy. Take your time.
MeredithOne at a time and make sure you do the 301.
Meredith's HusbandYes. For each of them, for every one that you delete. Yes.
MeredithCorrect.
Meredith's HusbandOkay. Aside from that, let's say you have you're looking at your list of your top 10 blog posts. You want to look for themes. Is there a common theme? No, not necessarily blogging about the same thing, but is there anything that would tie those together? So in my case, I might have uh you know several different blogs appearing relating to title tags. One of them is how to uh write title tags, one of them is what to do if you have duplicate title tags, another is what to do if you have title tags are too short or they're duplicated. There's a whole bunch of different reasons, a bunch of different issues that can happen with your title tags. If I saw like three or four of those blogs appearing in my top 10, that's a theme for me. So I know that I'm I'm going to want to essentially build what we call a content hub around title tags, a little mini guide of a few different pages about title tags.
MeredithHow do you do that?
Meredith's HusbandAnd then I would think about okay, well, which one is would I consider the the center of that hub? Which one's like the most general title tags?
MeredithRight.
Meredith's HusbandAnd then off of that hub, there's nucleus! There's exactly there's gonna be kind of like spokes. And one spoke will be like how long should it be? One
Spot Themes And Build Content Hubs
Meredith's Husbandspoke will be like what are duplicate type tags? How do I another spoke would be um, it should be long enough? Another one might be how do you actually write them? What is the format? So those could be different articles. I also could combine them all together. That's gonna be your call.
MeredithLike I can't what's preferable to have many little ones around a little hub or one central.
Meredith's HusbandYou know, it there is no exact way you can know this. It's kind of how different are the topics. Like in that in that case I just gave you about title tags, that probably could conceivably be one long page all about title tags. If I had something that were uh you know different, if I were say a photographer and I had a blog about how to photograph in the uh Arctic. How to photograph in the Arctic and how to photograph uh when it's cold outside. Okay. So not the best blogs, uh let me tell you that. But those sound like different posts, okay?
MeredithThey sound like the same post, Arctic and cold.
Meredith's HusbandNo, I mean I'm thinking how to photograph in the Arctic, like it's white everywhere, there is not much scenery, it's just like it's that's a more of like a technical like you're gonna be dealing with some weird lighting and there's not much happening. Like, how do you photograph that?
MeredithAnd then photographing in the cold is they would have they would intersperse, interconnect.
Meredith's HusbandThey're relate, they're related, but to me, I'm just using this as I'm trying to come up with an example off the top of my head.
MeredithNo, I know.
Meredith's HusbandAnd you're making it really easy.
MeredithThanks.
Meredith's HusbandUm, those to me just kind of sound like they would be two different posts.
MeredithRight.
Meredith's HusbandOkay. People would be coming to those for different reasons. The example that I use for the title tags, somebody coming to that post, there's a pretty good chance they're gonna want to see all of that at once.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandIf if the topics are, well, they're gonna want to see this information and they might want this other information, those would be different blog posts. That's kind of the general approach that I would take to it.
MeredithGot it.
When To Split Or Combine Topics
MeredithThank you.
Meredith's HusbandOkay. So just remember that the thing that we're trying to do here is we're trying to see what is Google already like, and then we're trying to build on that.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandBuild on that without writing the same blog over and over and over.
MeredithYes.
Meredith's HusbandThink of it like a content hub. If you want to think of it more, you could think of it like a pyramid, I guess, with your central topic at the top and then branching out to smaller topics down beneath. I kind of visualize it that way. Content hub is the phrase that most people use, though.
MeredithYou're kind of polishing it.
Meredith's HusbandYeah.
MeredithYeah?
Meredith's HusbandYeah.
MeredithYeah.
Meredith's HusbandI hope that helps. If that helps, let me know. I'm always curious. You can leave a review and tell me what you like just in general about the podcast. That's always good if there's some sort of consensus about what people appreciate. I try to do more of that. If you've already done that, thank you very much. Or you can leave a feedback in the show notes here right below where you can say, Yeah, that topic was great. Or I like topics about Marcel and Buster.
MeredithGonna have to get a photo of them up if you don't have it.
Meredith's HusbandYeah. This is good stuff. All right, bye bye.
MeredithThank you for listening.
