Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Are you often looking to find out how you can get more traffic to your blog? If you have, it’s likely that you’ve browsed many posts that confess to having the secret formula and many of them might work. But I want to suggest a blogging tactic that you probably haven’t read about and which could be the best way to increase your organic traffic! HubSpot calls it ‘The blogging tactic no one is talking about’. Relaunching your Old Blog Posts If you’ve had your blog for a couple of years, you’ll have realised that some posts simply get traction and others don’t. That’s common. But your next step is what I want to talk about. Typically, we cop it on the chin if some of our posts flatline and just move onto creating our next one. Is this what you do? If it is, you’re leaving your blog with a range of posts that simply don’t rank and don’t drive any traffic. And if you understand the concept of ‘crawl equity’, you’re potentially hurting your SEO efforts by keeping them. But what if you were to go back over those old posts that don’t rank well or drive any organic traffic, and relaunch them? How is Relaunching Old Blog Posts going to Increase Traffic to my Blog? You wouldn’t go back over all of them, but you should at least have a look and identify if some can and are worth being revived. The chances are that you likely fell into the trap of pumping out blog posts more frequently than you should have because you were told ‘Google loves fresh content’. This is true – Google did note in late 2011 that they were implementing a freshness factor to their algorithm, but this was largely (in my opinion) taken out of context. Bloggers (and businesses) started publishing more and more often with more focus on quantity than quality. That’s right…81.8 million posts published via WordPress every day in September ’17. (Source: https://wordpress.com/activity/posting/) That trend has made it more difficult to get your content seen. It also presents a huge problem for the searcher trying to wade through posts that largely don’t help them find what they need. I like this one from Convince&Convert: “As consumer comfort-level with information overload increases, so does their demand for high-quality content. Modern consumers are self-educating, and they’re adept with finding the information they need via the internet. In order to build a strong platform for your brand, your content will need to enable the self-starting consumer to conduct in-depth research all on their own.” So, if you look back on those old posts of yours, ask yourself ‘Are they quality posts? Do they provide value? If I was searching for this topic, would this post satisfy me?’ If you answered ‘no’ to any of those questions, then it might be worth you relaunching those old posts. So what Posts should I Relaunch? Try to classify each of your blog posts into one of the following four categories. 1. High Traffic/ High Conversions It’s likely that these posts don’t need to be relaunched (optimised). 2. High Traffic/ Low Conversions Why aren’t these posts converting? Depending on your objectives, have you placed prominent call-to-actions in them? It might be the case that the traffic is not spending enough time on the page (check your analytics) to see the CTAs and if that’s the case, you need to work on your headline and opening paragraphs. But it may be the case that your content for these posts is just not strong enough to encourage your readers to take action so there may be an opportunity to provide more value and even to ‘social proof’ them so that people will be more likely to act. 3. Low Traffic/ High Conversions If you’re low on traffic, then it’s likely that you need to improve your search visibility. There’s definitely a need to look at how these posts are addressing the searcher’s intent and ensuring that you’re answering their queries. You also need to look at optimising these posts and spend plenty of time promoting them all over again. Start by identifying your posts that are ranked anywhere between 10 – 20 for the relevant search terms. This demonstrates that these posts are on Google’s radar, but simply aren’t strong enough to break into the top 10 sources. If any of your posts are ranking higher than 30, there may be bigger issues and your task may really be ahead of you for those items. 4. Low Traffic/ Low Conversions Can these posts be optimised? What are their issues? Are they targeting topics that no one is searching? If that’s the case then you’re not likely to change that behaviour. Think about deleting these posts and redirecting the links to better-performing (but relevant) posts. If there is enough search traffic for the queries, then you may have something to work with, but it’s going to take some effort. What should I do to Relaunch my Blog Posts? 1. CREATE MORE VALUE FOR THE READER This is obviously the focal point of the whole process. So, you need to do your due diligence here. First, identify the topic you want to address. It should be one that will attract traffic to ultimately help you achieve your objectives. Understand the range of queries that your target audience has around this topic. TIP: Use lsigraph.com or answerthepublic.com to get some ideas around the search queries that are related to your specific topic. You can also go a step further and start testing these search terms with Google’s Keyword Planner to identify high-volume searches. You now need to understand how well your existing post is answering these main search queries. Fill in any content gaps to ensure you’re providing a comprehensive resource. If you can support your content with images or videos then do it. Your aim in many instances (whether it’s achievable or not) is to provide people searching with ‘the most valuable resource on the web’. Could your post be repurposed as an infographic? People love them (and share them). The Mention blog has some great tips on this very topic. CASE STUDY: HubSpot conducted a study of their own blog back in 2015 and had some interesting findings on longer-form content, including: – Articles with a word count between 2,250 and 2,500 words earned the most organic traffic. Source: Hubspot Blog – Articles with a word count over 2,500 were shared the most on social media. – Articles with a word count over 2,500 earned the most links. 2. RE-SEO THAT POST Was your post optimised for search engines when it was first published? Whether the answer to that is a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’, you need to look at it again. If you’ve changed your keyword/topic focus, then your optimisation will need some tweaking. What is your target keyword? Search for it in Google. Scroll to the bottom of the search result page and check out some of the ‘Searches related to…’ listings. These are related search terms that Google has identified. Try to implement them into your post if and where appropriate. Is your post broken down with sub-headings? Doing this will make it more ‘snackable’ and easier for people to read. But with the SEO hat on, it also gives you an opportunity to inject some important keyword terms into those sub-headings. Ideally, they should be implemented with h2 tags. If you’ve got sub-sub-headings, then use h3 tags. The tags help to demonstrate a hierarchy. Look at your heading. Is it compelling? Your heading might be all that a potential reader sees, whether it be in their social news feed or in Google’s search results. If it doesn’t get their attention and encourage them to click, then you’ve lost an opportunity. TIP: Check out CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. Start testing a whole range of blog post titles to get an optimal score. Aim for 60+. Here’s a range of other SEO tips to ensure you’re giving your post that extra boost: Link to authoritative sites where appropriate. Link to other relevant pages on your post (and vice-versa). Got images? Make sure they have relevant and keyword-related file names, title and alt tags. Make sure they also are the right size and are compressed. Look at your meta title and description. Do they both still reflect your newly updated post? Can you make them more compelling in search results? 3. RE-PUBLISH AND RE-PROMOTE The first benefit you’re going to see when you re-publish your post with today’s date is that it will go to the top of your blog feed. It will get more attention and more clicks. You then need to re-share it on your social media profiles. You probably did this when it was first published but what you may not have done back then was share it more than once. Won’t that be pestering my followers? A little spammy? You’re not going to repeat the same post. Check out this formula to give you a guide. TIP: Missinglettr is a great tool to schedule different social posts and schedule them over the course of 12 months. And why go to this extra effort you might ask? To answer this, we should look at how long your posts are expected to last on social media. Here’s what The Refinery published on their blog: Twitter: 18 minutes Facebook: 5 hours Instagram: 21 hours LinkedIn: 24 hours 18 minutes Pinterest: 4 months Blog post: 2 years YouTube: 20 days or more If Twitter is part of your content distribution, then you have only 18 minutes! Can you get it in front of enough eyeballs? Or the right eyeballs in that time? And when is the best 18 minutes to have your post visible? Make the most of your social following and get the reach you deserve. Work on the above formula and share your posts more than once. Besides social media, there’s also many, many more opportunities to re-promote your freshly updated and improved blog post. Most likely on platforms that you didn’t use when you first published. Check out these sites: – Medium. – LinkedIn Pulse. – Business 2 Community. – Reddit (share it and also link to it in ‘Answers’ on the topic). – Quora (publish it and also link to it in ‘Answers’ on the topic). And no, this doesn’t mean you’ll have duplicate content. Each of the above sites will point back to yours, ensuring you get credit. Besides, Google will have already crawled the post on your site and have it attributed to you anyway. What results can I expect? If there’s one certainty, it’s that there’s no certainty. With Google likely being your website’s key traffic source, we can’t guarantee anything. But picture what Google will identify when they start crawling a relaunched blog post after you go through this optimising process: – They’ll see an updated post with more content, covering more related topic queries. – They’ll see a post that’s getting more traffic from social media and other websites. – They’ll see less people coming from Google and then doubling-back (pogo-sticking). – They’ll see people spending more time on your page. It’s certainly not a stretch to say that you SHOULD expect a boost in your organic traffic. Seriously, your old posts are potential treasure troves of organic traffic and leads. This article originally appeared on the OnQ Marketing Blog titled ‘How to Relaunch your Blog Posts and Increase Organic Traffic‘ and has been republished with permission. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Kane Pepi.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Kane Pepi <p>Kane Pepi is an experienced financial and cryptocurrency writer with over 2,000+ published articles, guides, and market insights in the public domain. Expert niche subjects include asset valuation and analysis, portfolio management, and the prevention of financial crime. Kane is particularly skilled in explaining complex financial topics in a user-friendly … View full profile ›More by this author:VoIP Basics: Everything Beginners Should Know!Bitcoin Investment, Trading & Mining: The Ultimate Guide for BeginnersIs This a Better Way to Set Your 2020 Goals and Resolutions?