Want To Increase Your Blog Traffic?
As bloggers our main focus is on creating new content for our blogs, but what about those older posts from our archives?
If you've been blogging for a while you might have hundreds of blog posts in your archives. How do you figure out which ones are worth updating?
A good place to start is by looking at your traffic stats. Posts that bring in the most traffic are a good place to begin. Updating these 'Evergreen' posts will ensure that new visitors to your blog get the best first impression (especially if these posts were from a year or more ago).
You might also like: Exploring CTA's: Different Types of Calls To Action To Use in Your Blog Posts
Ways To Upgrade Old Blog Posts
Graphics
By updating the graphics on an older post you instantly give it a fresh look. If you use visuals when sharing your posts on social media (which I hope you do), then this is an easy to share the same post again without your followers getting bored of the same old same old. e.g. they might have pinned your old graphic to a board on Pinterest. By giving them a new, fresh, image, they can pin it again to a different board and share your content again with their followers.
Your branding may have changed since you did the original post too, so by updating the graphics you can make sure that your best posts have a consistent look.
You might also want to think about adding additional graphics to the post e.g. if your post only has a horizontal image consider adding a vertical image too. Vertical images work better on Pinterest.
Broken Links
Any blog that has been going for a while is bound to have a broken link or two somewhere.
Broken links are links that do not reach their intended destination. This could be because the page you linked to has been removed. When readers click on a broken link they are most likely to end up seeing a 404 error page. Too many broken links on your website will mean you lose credibility.
Broken links also have a negative effect on your website ranking.
Add Keywords
Keywords are incredibly important for SEO. Make sure you've added a meta description to the post, and used your keywords in your posts title and content.
Reworking your posts title can be a great way to increase traffic to an older blog post. If your original post had a random title like "Recent Musings" it's not doing anything for your SEO. Change the title to something that includes your keywords and makes people want to read your post.
Additional Links
Since writing the original blog post you may have written more blog posts related to the topic. Add your newer links to the older blog post. A simple way to do this is by adding the text "You might also like: INSERT LINK HERE'.
Content
Typo's happen to the best of us. Run your old blog post through a spell checker or a site like Grammarly to make sure no mistakes got through.
If you find that a lot of changes need to be made to the content (e.g. due to outdated information), then you might want to consider deleting the post and creating a new one instead.
Looking for help with your blog? Struggling to come up with ideas, or need help with your branding, SEO, or website design? I can help!
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