Gotta love my SEO strategist. He came up with a jewel. After going through my archived blog to find any search trends, and identify if there were any high ranking articles, he found a treasure trove. Close to 30 posts were doing really well in Google, content on my archived site that people were searching for and still found relevant.
The big problem is that they were in the archives. So last week Rahul suggested that we move some of the old, high ranking content to our new site, update them a tiny bit and make them feel new again. Best of all these small tweaks would allow us to rank even higher on the very platform we were SEO’ing for the very first time. Then there was another good piece of news, search was up again since the first Covid-19 outbreak. Content sites were starting to get hits and a higher incidence of search terms per user were being trafficked than before lockdown. Oh, and it gets better. Facebook announced that there were 2.6 billion users on its platform during the pandemic.
How To Refresh Old Blog Posts
Translation. I figured some of these eyeballs could be our customers and that there was now a higher intent to digest content than before the pandemic outbreak. For me, that news and Rahul’s newly discovered treasure trove were sweet spots. Since I can spot an opportunity from a mile away, I knew Rahul had delivered something we had to take advantage of.
So how do you make old articles new again? Rahul gave me a list of 30 posts. My first task was to go through each, establish the ones that were good enough to move to the new site without changes, pick out the ones that needed modifying and start the small edits or design upgrades.
Refresh Your Old Blog Posts.
Once those tasks were completed this was what my task sheet looked like, I had to…
1. Check out monetization opportunities. Some of the old posts were not written with this strategy in mind and while all posts do not have to be monetized, it was useful for me to check out which ones could be and if the items were in stock.
2. Put a note in my calendar so that I could remember to update the publishing date when the posts were refreshed.
3. Make sure pictures were optimised, in some of my older posts attention wasn’t always placed on this.
3. Submit the post for indexing.
4. Re-jigger my content calendar and make sure old content had a seamless fit with the new.
5. Schedule social promotion with an informal advisory that spoke to why the post was being republished. This helps avid readers understand the post repeat.
7. Check on analytics to understand what extensions to the content I could deliver.
Rahul said all of these tweaks would work best when integrated into my social media planner (YOU CAN GET THESE AT NO COST ONCE YOU SIGN UP FOR SIMPLIFY HERE) alongside my old content. We have just begun the process and I can’t wait to get back to you with the results.
