Your old blog posts are important assets because SEO is a long-term effort. On top of that, blogging still works. In fact, 84% of organizations have an ongoing content marketing strategy, and they generate 67% more leads per month than those who don’t.
How To Use Old Blog Posts To Improve Your SERP Rankings?
Your old content already ranks in search. Instead of starting from scratch, you can improve your SERP from an already established ranking. The stage is already set – the only thing you need to do now is use what you already have to climb ranks in the SERPS. Here is how to do it!
Analyze your blog before doing anything
Before you can do anything, you need to discover the exact state your old content is in. Fortunately, you have access to many blog analytics tools you can use to check all the essential elements of SEO. Some of the key metrics to focus on include keywords and website loading speed.
However, to differentiate old blog posts in terms of how much they contribute to your SERP ranks, you should pay more attention to organic traffic and bounce rates.
Organic traffic will help you discover blog posts that still generate clicks. With a little bit of tuning, you can turn these posts into evergreen pieces and leverage them to improve your SERP. Bounce rates will help you discover outdated blog posts that bear no value to your website visitors.
Finally, there are analytics tools you can use to track website changes. In the coming weeks, you will be making many changes to your blog. The ability to track the changes is an excellent option to have if you decide to revert to older versions.
Improve your SERP with new keywords
If your blog posts generate sufficient organic traffic, but the bounce rates are above the roof, the chances are that you are not hitting the sweet spot in terms of attracting the ideal target audience. Diving deeper into keyword research can provide you with answers on how to attract your prospects.
See, the thing is that search volume and keyword difficulty change over time, as do your prospects’ online behavior and purchase intent.
To optimize your website for success, you need to use the most relevant keywords. Keyword research can help you identify relevant keywords with high search volume and low difficulty. You can edit your blog posts and add new keywords to improve results, and get that old content to work for you again.
Add new links
The links in your old blog posts are pivotal for SEO efforts. It goes to both internal and external links. Search engines like Google run sophisticated algorithms to better understand what your site is about before ranking it. Search engines use the links and anchor text to do it better.
Your first goal is to analyze your old blog posts, look for broken links, and replace them with links that actually work. Next, you should add internal and external links.
Internal links will help you point out the most important pages on your website to search engines and tell them what the pages are about. Plus, they can help your visitors easily navigate the site, engage them, and enhance the experience.
Adding external links can also improve your SERP and open the door for an ongoing link-building strategy. External links can help you add depth and value to your content, improve topical signals, build trust, and demonstrate expertise.
Share your old posts
Social media platforms can be a great source of organic traffic. Given that you have old content ready to go, you can use it to engage a social media audience and build a larger social media following. Many companies don’t pursue this strategy because they don’t have the resources to regularly produce and share new content.
Your old posts can give you enough time to work to produce new content as you will be able to share old posts. The best thing about it is that you don’t have to do it manually.
You should consider using a social media management tool to streamline your workflow. You can use it to connect all your social media channels, create a publishing plan, and schedule posts. The tool will automatically share your old blog posts.
Plus, you get to dive into analytics and reports to assess the performance of each one of your posts and identify the most relevant social media channel for your business.
Republishing posts with newly discovered relevant keywords and adding a new date can also help improve your SERP. People prefer reading recent posts more than those that date back 5+ years. If you are worried about being penalized for duplicate content, you can avoid it with 301 redirects.
Update posts
Another way to leverage your old posts to boost your SEO is to rewrite them. It can help make your posts more relevant, valuable, and engaging. Besides updating your visitors with new developments, your updated posts can help you attract new readers, increase traffic, and improve your position in SERPs.
There are a couple of things you can do. Expanding old posts by adding new relevant information is the most logical course of action. However, you can also update your cover image, make your headlines more engaging, and add a table of contents to make it easier for readers to skim through your posts.
Refresh on-page SEO
The last thing you can do with your old blog posts to improve SERP rank is to refresh on-page SEO. It’s important to analyze all your blog posts because you might have forgotten to optimize on-page SEO when you posted them.
Now that you have a fresh keyword research report, you can use the relevant keywords to update:
- Title tag
- Subheadings
- URL
- Image alt text
- Meta title
- Meta description