A lot of the time when business owners look at how they can improve traffic to their website with an SEO service or strategy, the focus is on doing new things. A good example is creating new content. However, if you regularly publish content on your website, such as a blog, there is some low hanging fruit you should reach up and grab – optimizing your old posts and content.
Off-site and on-page optimization is still important for good SEO, and they shouldn’t be neglected. According to Kiwi Website Design, Optimising your existing content can help too, however, plus it is often easier and less time consuming than creating new content.
The aim is to improve your old posts with some key objectives in mind:
- Ensure the content is still relevant.
- Make the post rank higher than it does now.
- Rank the post for additional keywords.
- Generate more traffic to the post.
- Get more conversions from the post.
There are seven crucial steps to optimizing and improving old posts and content.
Step 1 – Choose the Best Content to Update and Optimise
The first step is to choose which posts you should update. The types of posts to focus on include:
- Posts that already have high levels of traffic.
- Content that generates the most conversions.
- Content that is not getting as many visitors as it used to.
- Posts that have information that is now out of date or no longer applicable.
- Posts with broken links.
Once you have a list of posts that would benefit from being updated, you should ask whether it would be better to create a new post instead. For example, a post on the top trend for 2015 probably wouldn’t benefit from an update. Creating a new post would be the better option in this situation.
Step 2 – Review the Keywords You Are Targeting
For the content, you have decided to update, start by looking at the main and secondary keywords you originally targeted.
You should then use your analytics or SEO analysis tool to find the keywords that people actually use to find your post, i.e., the keywords that bring traffic to the post.
You should then use this information to decide on the main and secondary keywords that your post should be targeting, updating the content accordingly. Remember to update the text, headings, page title, and meta description as required.
Try not to change the URL of the page if you can avoid it. If you need to update the page URL, make sure you 301 redirect the old URL to the new one to ensure Google recognizes the connection between the two.
Step 3 – Review Top Ranking Content
One of your goals when optimizing old blog posts and content should be to make the updated version better than anything else that is available. So, go back to the keyword work you did a couple of steps earlier. Type those keywords into Google and review the pages that rank the highest. These pages should be the benchmark for your revised and improved page.
Step 4 – Fix the Errors
Pages can develop errors as they get older, as links change, and as your website gets updated. Your post might also have content that is now incorrect or outdated along with broken links. Now is a good time to fix all of these problems. The main things to look out for include:
- Broken links, both internal and external links
- Broken or outdated images
- Incorrect or outdated information
- Code errors as well as layout and formatting problems
- Spelling mistakes
- Structural mistakes, such as multiple H1 tags on the page
Also Read: Safest & Fastest Way To Build High-Quality Backlinks For A New Blog
Step 5 – Update the Content with New Information or Insights
Now you need to update the content to make it more comprehensive, relevant, and/or helpful than it was before. You could answer new questions, provide more in-depth information on a particular topic, or add new examples.
It’s not just text either, as you could also update the images or add a video. Your objective should be to make the post as good as possible.
Step 6 – Update the Internal Links
You will have added and changed the posts and pages on your website since you originally published this content, so the internal links are likely to be out of date. So, update the internal links to also include newer and more relevant pages.
Step 7 – Republish and Promote the Post
Now it’s time to publish and promote the post. If you have regular, loyal readers, you should consider adding a note at the top of the content that it has been updated. You will only need to do this if you think there will be readers who recognize the post from before.
In terms of publishing the updated post, change the date to the current day’s date and then click on update to republish.
You then need to promote the post the same way you promote new content. Examples include sharing the post on social media, including it in your email newsletter, adding it to sales material you send to potential customers, etc.
Maximizing the Potential of Your Existing Content
Optimizing your old posts and content is not the only SEO service you will ever need. However, it makes sense to maximize the potential of content that you have already put work into. Remember, every page and post on your website can be improved to get better results.
Also Read: Blogging- This Is What Professionals Know!
