5 Strategies to Bring Old Posts Back to Life
neilpatel.com
Step 1 – Make a list of all your posts Go to your Google analytics account, navigate to “Behavior > Overview”.
You’ll see a list of your top posts on the right. Click the “view full report” link in the bottom right hand corner. This will show you a more detailed list of your posts. However, there will still only be the default list of 10 posts. Scroll to the bottom and change the “show rows” option to 5,000
Finally, go back up to the top of the page and click “export”. Then, pick one of the spreadsheet options in the drop-down menu:
Step 2 – Add any other relevant metrics In this step, you need to pick the posts that make the most sense to drive traffic to. Take a look at the following metrics: goal conversion rate (usually email list signups) time on page bounce rate social shares backlinks per 1,000 visitors (or per any number of visitors) To find social shares, you can use any “bulk social share checker”. For backlink check you can use Majestic’s bulk backlink checker. When the results are returned, paste the data in the main spreadsheet. Then, simply divide the number of backlinks (or linking domains) to each URL in your spreadsheet by the number of visitors you’ve had for each. This will give you a “backlink/visitor” metric that you can use to compare them together.
Step 3 – Decide which posts to prioritize You need to identify as many or as few old blog posts that have the best impact on your business. The more posts that you pick to focus on, the less traffic will go to each individual post, so try not to pick too many posts (I’d say pick 30max). 1. Email and social are in your control In general, there are 3 major opportunities to increase traffic to old posts with social and email marketing. Option #1 – Include links in autoresponders Option #2 – Link to content during sales campaigns Option #3 – Regularly share old content on social media 2. Internal linking is on-going maintenance Step 1: Link often when creating posts Before you finish each new post, make sure to take extra time to refer to the list of important old posts (that you made earlier), and see if it makes sense to link to any of them. Step 2: Create a list of your most important posts Make a list of the different categories you write about, and determine the main posts that you’ll be regularly linking to. Having these links on hand will save you a lot of time. Step 3: Regularly go back and add internal links into older posts I recommend scheduling time every 5-10 posts that you publish to find other related previous posts that you can add an internal link to. This gives your “new” post an instant rankings boost, and a trickle of secondary traffic from those other old blog posts.
3. Re-visit your keyword targeting Go to “Search traffic > Search analytics” in Google Webmaster Tools This will show you a graph of your search activity for the last 30 days, plus the queries you rank for. Click the “download” button at bottom left of the screen (scroll all the way down). It will give you a spreadsheet of all your queries, along with their individual stats. Open it in Excel or Google Docs and highlight the top row of titles. Then, click the filter button:
What we want to do: The goal is to identify keywords with a decent search volume that you’re not specifically targeting, but still ranking fairly well for. To do this, click on the filter arrow beside the “position” heading. Then, click “filter by condition”, and choose “is between” from the dropdown menu.
Start with “3” on the low end, and picking a high end of 15-20. There’s one more filter you need to put in place now. Click the down arrow for “impressions”, and click “filter by condition” again. This time, however, you need to pick “greater than” from the drop down.
You want to make sure that there are a significant amount of people searching for the term. You can pick any number you want, but I recommend starting on the high side (~200), and then lowering it if there aren’t enough results left.
You should now have a list of queries that have solid potential. Next up, find the page that ranks for that term by just searching it in Google. There are 2 things you can do to make it rank better: 1. Basic on-page SEO – Make sure the keyword or phrase appears in the title, once or twice in the article, and once or twice in subheadlines. 2. Make it more clickable – You can re-write the meta description and title (make it entic ing) to increase your CTR. This will directly give you more traffic, but could also improve rankings.
4. You also control your navigation Option #1 – Links in the sidebar Among the old posts include the right posts, the ones that are the most interesting and valuable in the sidebar. Option #2 – Links in the menu You can link to some of this most popular content in the header menu. Option #3 – below the post A final option for linking to old posts is after any post. There are many related post plugins for WordPress that will automatically display as many related posts as you’d like.
5. If all else fails, update and re-publish This final option isn’t about funneling traffic to a certain page on your website, it’s about increasing the value of your old posts so that people will go out of their way to see it. Option 1 – Republish an old post This option is best if your blog has grown a lot over time. Option 2 – Create a completely new, updated post Some posts you can’t just re-publish because they lose value over time. In some cases, they lose a lot of value. This tactic doesn’t always drive traffic to the old post, but it can re-use a lot of the original content to cut down on content costs. In addition, sometimes you’ll be able to link to the old post early on in the new post. Option 3 – just update it By updating a post once in a while, you make sure it retains its usefulness. In most cases, you don’t need to completely overhaul it, just update a few small aspects once or twice a year. Lastly, If you use the 5 ways I outlined in this article to drive traffic to your old blog posts, you will see a fairly quick increase in overall traffic and conversions.