Abhishek Chauhan
It’s likely that your old blog posts just aren’t giving you the site traffic you need anymore. Content is one of the key vehicles to direct site visitors your way, and it can be a lot easier to tweak your existing blog content rather than generate new ideas.
Driving users to your old inventory gives you a better return on investment (ROI), and often older content attracts higher traffic since it is shared more. It can also bring on a high volume of organic searches and more frequent links. That is why we have provided the following strategies to refresh your existing blogs and optimize the content to climb search rankings.
Create a Content Inventory
First things first. Before you can start revamping your blog content, you will need to have a clear picture of where you are. Did you know the typical lifespan of a blog is two years? During this time, over 70% of its total impressions come from the first month. If you have blogs that are nearing two years old or more, you will want to revisit them. Take an inventory of your old blogs and see how they fit into your current business strategy. This can help you see which blogs are still relevant but need tweaking or are simply no longer useful.
You can use several different tools to quickly put together a list of your blog posts, including Google analytics. Use metrics such as time on page, social share, goal conversion rate, backlinks, and bounce rate to determine which posts to refresh. You will most likely want to focus on posts that perform poorly or refreshing ones that are doing well to make sure they are still relevant. Once you’ve determined which content you will be updating, these three strategies can help give your old content a new life:
1. Keep the Content Evergreen
Check the content for any outdated information or references that are no longer relevant. Begin removing things such as:
● Outdated statistics
● Old links
● Wording that keeps posts from being evergreen, such as time and date references
● Mentions of companies no longer in business
● Outdated cultural references
You may want to add additional media content and quotes to your existing content to keep up with current search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Increasing the word count to create a longer blog can help your page rank higher, as long as the extra words add value. Choosing a content creation partner can ensure that your additional words have the merit you need to get a strong ROI.
2. Check Keywords
Determine what keywords your site is currently ranking high for, and make sure to optimize older posts for those keyword targets. You can do this by using the Google Search Console or an SEO tool to give you the ranking and keyword data for your site. Choose a target keyword and a couple of secondary keywords from page one of the Google search page. Your post’s content should line up with the page one results.
When choosing keywords, it is better to improve the ranking of existing keyword targets than to add different ones within your post. Check for secondary keywords that you can use and other page one results such as titles, video featured snippets, or carousels that can give you more insight into the types of posts users prefer. All of this information can help you refresh your posts and make them more relevant.
3. Increase Internal Links
Internal links not only improve your SEO but can also create a more positive experience for your users. These types of links allow you to direct user traffic while still giving them a choice to follow. You should make sure you have excellent anchor text and check older posts for any broken links. If there are broken links, remove them and replace them with links to your new posts or other relevant sources.
You can link back to older posts in any new content that you write; just make sure that it is relevant and valuable to the reader. You should also revisit older posts and add links to new content to improve the new content’s ranking and add a bit of traffic to your older blogs.
Increase Traffic to Your Old Content
Social media and email platforms give you control over your search engine traffic by controlling the specific content you share and how and when you share with your audience. You can increase traffic to old posts by:
● Links in autoresponder emails to new subscribers
● Links to older posts during sales promotions
● Using social media to share older posts
Updating your old blogs is essential for many reasons, but most importantly, it helps you stay relevant and increases your blog’s SEO. Ensure that the content is up-to-date by optimizing your keywords and tying your older blogs to current content through internal links. Doing this will all go a long way in giving new life to your tried and true content. To get the new content for your blog you can also create a section that call write for us on your blog.
