An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.
We all know that creating original content on a regular basis is important to improving SEO and attracting organic traffic to your website. But, here’s a surprise: Most of your traffic will come from older blog posts.
An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.
If you have a lot of content, that may scare you. (Sounds like a lot of work!) But, as with everything, being strategic about optimizing historic blog content will pay off many times over. Here’s how I suggest going about that.
Pick your posts
At Fronetics, about 80% of our traffic comes from posts that are 6 months old or older. HubSpot also discovered a similar trend: 76% of its monthly views came from old posts, as well as 92% of the company’s monthly leads!
[bctt tweet=”76% of HubSpot’s monthly views come from old posts and 92% of their monthly leads.” username=”Fronetics”]
But not all posts were created equal. In fact, HubSpot found they got about half of their monthly leads from only 30 posts, and they blog at a blistering pace of about 200 new posts every month. Going back and optimizing hundreds of your old posts is a waste of time.
Hunt through your analytics and look for historical blog posts with:
High traffic and high conversion rates: Readers view these posts often and convert frequently after reading them. Found any of these? Congrats. Most companies won’t have more than 1 or 2.
High traffic but low conversation rates: These are the posts are viewed often but don’t generate leads.
Low traffic but high conversion rates: These posts only garner a small number of hits but do well generating leads due to a higher-than-normal number of call-to-action click-throughs.
All set? Have a list of good blogs to work with? Here comes the fun part!
5 tips for optimizing historic blog content
Here are 5 tips to squeeze the absolute most out of your older blog posts (in terms of leads and conversions).
1. Update the content.
Rework it for today. Take out anything outdated and use a little finesse to make it more relevant. Don’t overhaul it; that’s unnecessary for a well-performing post.
2. Spice up the call-to-actions.
You’ll want to pay special attention to this for the posts that have high traffic but low conversion rates. CTAs have evolved. Old ones just aren’t going to appeal.
Revamp the CTA placement and appearance, and think (hard) again about your CTA content. Consider the language of the CTA and whether it fits the reader’s goal. What keyword(s) are they using to find the page? And does the CTA reflect this?
There’s so much information out there on making strong CTAs, but the bottom line is the CTA must match the intent of the audience.
Keep it bold. Keep it clear. And make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.
3. Relook at your keywords.
For the posts that do well converting leads but don’t get a lot of traffic, you’ll need to take a fresh look at keywords.
Trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out. But it still has merit here, as long as you understand it within the larger picture of restructuring your website content into topic clusters and pillar content.
And here’s the beauty of optimizing historical blog content: You already have the data to know which keywords your audience are using to find the posts. Then prominently feature the keyword(s) in several places.
If you’ve done the hard work to update the CTA and the keywords, updating the meta description is a natural next step. Keep it as close to (but not over) 155-165 characters. Include your keyword(s). Explain the value of the post to the reader. And keep in mind your ultimate CTA goal. Everything should align to make the meta description a true synthesis of the post; if it doesn’t, go back and tweak a little more.
5. Republish and keep the URL.
Things that are “fresh” receive preferential treatment from Google. (We know it’s hard to believe when 2012 articles are at the top of your search results, but it’s true.)
But do not lose that original URL when you publish again. It pulls way more SEO “rank” than a new one. Keep the URL even if you updated the title of the post and the URL doesn’t match perfectly anymore. It’s OK.
(It’s not a bad idea to put in an editor’s note at the end of the article if the blog already has garnered comments, so your future audience won’t be confused by a publish date that is later than the date on the comments.)
And that’s it. 30 days after optimizing your historic blog content, go back and see how successful your efforts were. Track the metrics: post views, CTA click-throughs, lead generation, and keyword ranking. We’re betting they’ve gone up.
Measuring the success of your SEO strategy shouldn’t be done by measuring the success of one post at a time. But making the most of your best old posts is an important part of any good content marketing strategy.
Final tip
The final tip isn’t really about optimizing historic blog content, so let’s call it a ½ tip. Remember how Tip 1 recommended reworking the old posts but warned against overhauling them with large rewrites?
Well… Here’s the thing. If you have 12 historic blog posts you just optimized, you should write 12 new blog posts on that same content, too.
Recycle that good historic content into additional fresh content. After all, it’s what your audience is searching for!
Internet users are changing how they search, and search engines are changing in response — which means writing for SEO is changing, too.
We just wrapped up a detailed series on how SEO is changing and what that means for those of us trying to reach potential customers in the digital world. Writing for SEO means creating content that drives traffic, preferably highly qualified traffic that will convert to sales leads. Basically, you need to write your web pages in a way that tells search engines what your site is all about.
Search engines have been working overtime to keep up with the ways internet users are searching the web. Developers are frequently updating the algorithms that Google and Bing use to make sure that users are finding exactly what they’re looking for.
This means that writing for SEO is also changing. You need to keep up with the changes to make sure your content is reaching your target audiences. Trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out.
So, what now?
Make sure you are focusing your content on what your business does best and structure your content around those topics. It’s called the topic cluster model.
Do you know all the latest packaging trends? Do you love helping clients cut down on production costs? Use these areas of expertise to build website content that support your pillar content.
In this video we’ll discuss the four things to know in a changing search landscape and what you can do to stay ahead of these changes.
Video: Writing for SEO tips
I do want to mention that you should never artificially stuff your blog posts with keywords or links or images. After all, search engines will continue to evolve to help readers find what they’re looking for. They’ve gotten really good at spotting these stuffed posts, so stop wasting your time trying to outsmart them.
Your best bet to improve SEO is to create content that is valuable to your target audience. Then you should use these tips as a guide to help users looking for content like yours to find it.
These 5 steps will help you identify topic clusters for your business that improve your search engine visibility and drive traffic to your website.
As search engines adjust their algorithms to be more sophisticated, marketers have the opportunity to structure content strategically to optimize website search rankings. We’ve written in detail about this new reality in our writing for SEO series.
One of the best ways to strategically structure your content is with the topic cluster model, in which broad cornerstone content is contained on pillar pages, and related subtopics are contained in cluster content. Each grouping of subtopics and corresponding pillar page is called a topic cluster.
This structure is intended to build authority and influence for your business in the eyes of search engines and visitors. Effectively using a topic cluster structure is the best way to drive relevant traffic to your website.
First you need to identify your pillar content. HubSpot’s Leslie Ye sums up her philosophy of choosing pillar content, saying, “Ask yourself this: would this page answer every question the reader who searched X keyword had, AND is it broad enough to be an umbrella for 20-30 posts?”
The key takeaway here is that your core topics need to be broad enough to encompass a fair amount of content, narrow enough to allow you to fully address the topic with your content, and, most importantly, they need to be in an area of expertise for your business.
So how do you identify topic clusters strategically? Below are five steps to get you started.
5 steps to identify topic clusters
1) Chart out five to ten primary issues that your target buyer persona faces. You can do this by running interviews, conducting surveys, and researching within online communities like Quora to gather your data.
2) Group each of the issues into broad topic areas.
3) Using keyword research, flesh out each of the core topics with subtopics.
4) Audit your historical content, and map it to align with each of the core topics and surrounding subtopics.
5) Assess where your content makes the strongest cases. Those are your core topics.
Use these 8 quick tips in your blog posts to improve SEO and help your target audience find your content.
Search engine optimization: It’s a phrase every blog writer looking to grow readership has wrestled with at one time or another. Part science, part art, SEO writing can evade even the most seasoned blogger. You want people searching the internet to find your blog, but you also want readers to enjoy your posts and not feel like they’re written for machines.
Search engines continue to evolve and improve their algorithms to make sure readers are finding exactly what they’re looking for. Never artificially stuff your posts with keywords, links or images. Search engines, like Google, penalize webpages that use sneaky techniques, like keyword stuffing, by demoting or even removing their pages from their indexes.
Ultimately, if you want to improve your SEO, your content needs to be value to your target audience. That should be your priority when planning and producing content like blog posts. But you can also keep these quick tricks in mind to optimize your posts, and thus increase the likelihood internet searchers will find them in the first place.
Infographic: 8 quick tips for blog posts to improve SEO
Using these 8 quick tips will improve SEO and get your blog posts in front of your target audience. Remember, your best bet on moving up on search engine results pages is to create content that readers want to read. Sounds simple, I know, but it can be challenging. Let us know how these tips helped improve your SEO.
Measuring the success of your content is important in evaluating your writing for SEO strategy. Here’s how to do that.
This week, we’re wrapping up our series on writing for SEO. In this series, we’ve explored how search engines are changing, how people are changing the way they search, and how to make use of topic clusters and pillar content. Now, with a better understanding of the changing SEO landscape, it’s time to think about how to measure the success of your content.
As with any marketing effort, having a documented strategy for your content’s search engine performance — and a plan for measuring the success of your strategy — is key. You might be asking yourself, “How do I measure the success of a piece of content?”
Should I measure the success of one post at a time?
When it comes to SEO, the answer to this question can be complicated, largely because it’s not a great idea to evaluate the success of your campaign on a post-by-post basis. It’s too narrow a definition of success to account for the complex network of direct and indirect benefits of effective SEO writing.
Take brand-driven content, for example. Your focus isn’t about generating individual sales, but rather about elevating your brand, raising wider awareness, attracting new talent, or generating backlinks. If you based the success of brand-driven content on the number leads it generated alone, you’d think it was performing terribly. But your post may, in fact, have generated hundreds of backlinks and be getting lots of traffic.
Evaluating by cluster topic
So how do you evaluate success? Rather than looking at your content on a post-by-post basis, consider how all the content under each cluster topic performs as a whole.
According to HubSpot, “Measuring the entire topic cluster against all of your core business metrics will enable you to include residual benefits coming from content that doesn’t align with direct conversion goals.”
As you look at the performance of your topic clusters, consider the following four questions:
Which topics perform best at driving traffic to your website or other web presence?
Which topics earn you the most leads?
Which topics drive the most revenue for your business?
Which topics earn the most backlinks/coverage?
It’s important to remember that at the end of the day, what you’re working toward — and what will work best for your search visibility — is creating content that people want to see. Writing for SEO is ultimately about creating better content, increasing search engine visibility, and providing the best possible experience for your site visitors.
