Are you losing traffic and dropping search rankings continuously? Here are a few easy tips to refresh your old blog posts. Learn how to make your old posts alive again and make them top the search engine charts, attract more traffic, conversions and backlinks.
Consistency and delivering fresh content are the keys to a successful content marketing strategy and there is no second opinion on that. However, updating and maintaining your old blogs especially the popular ones is vital for delivering your best shot.
The famous blogger Neil Patel strongly feels that there is no point in spending huge money on creating new posts and letting them die in the blog graveyard. This dramatically cuts down the ROI. He firmly believes that older posts have the capability of generating organic traffic much more than the new ones. Refreshing old content is not only pertinent to your financial part but adds value to your new readers as well.
It’s not necessary to resurface all your old posts in one go. There are essentially two strategies to pick posts.
1. Identify Your Top Performing Posts
Your analytics would take you to your destination. Look out for the posts that are
· Having good inbound links
· Still generating traffic for you
· High-performers on social media
2. Relevancy and Trend
In addition to metrics-driven selection, update the posts that are relevant as per the current trends and upkeep your digital marketing goals as well.
Now, without further ado, let’s get started on how to update the old posts for SEO traffic.
1. Update Outdated Information
Over time, as things change, some parts of your blog posts may need modification as they turn stale and obsolete and no longer relevant. Refurnish your post and evaluate it that what all needs to be added, removed or modified.
You’ll need to edit everything that obstructs the post from becoming evergreen.
For example:
Date, year etc may not be relevant once the timestamp changes. Such as, “trending things in 2018” may not stay the same in 2020.
Outdated statistics
Broken links
Preferences to organizations or websites that are no longer operational
Any mentions such as “it’s been a year” or “in the next couple of months” etc.
2. Media
Add more infographics, relevant images or even embed a relevant video.
Search engines love these!
If you already have images then cross-check their alt-tags, file-names and keywords. According to Neil Patel, adding a media after every 350 words is a great practice.
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3. Give a quick, Concise and Relevant Intro
Giving a 2-3 line introduction at the beginning of the post allows the reader to understand what all will be covered in the post. It’s a good content strategy to be followed as it helps the audience to get engaged with the juice of the content quicker.
Learn how to schedule Hootsuite stories through Instagram.
4. Broken Links
Broken links deeply hurt your SEO campaign and are indeed one of the prominent reasons for your dropped rankings. There are many tools available to check your broken links such as brokenlinkcheck.com, check my links (a chrome extension) etc.
So, now you know the links. You can delete it or find a better replacement for it.
It’s always better to link with a website having high domain authority.
5. More Words?
Long-form of content is trending and ranks better than shorter ones. People are looking for answers and you need to make sure that your post is answering their query. It’s not about a paragraph or a line, but every word that you add should bring value to the reader.
Apart from that, adding quotes from experts give you an opportunity to link back to high authority domains as well as serve as proof to your claims.
Here are some key things that you need to remember while updating your blog posts.
Try to keep the URL the same. In-case your URL needs a change make sure to use the 303 redirect to avoid a broken link presence.
In case you want to change the title, retain the keywords.
Optimize the meta description.
Resubmit the updated post to Google Search Console.
Keep on Revising your Content Consistently and Watch Your Rankings Soar
Always remember, you need to strike a good balance between great content and remarkable SEO. Follow the latest SEO practices but don’t forget to refresh your old posts as well. Truly speaking, OLD is GOLD!
Are you incorporating content updations in your SEO strategy?
Need help in your SEO or blogging issues? Connect with me on saniagupta.com. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook to get the latest insights from the blogging world.