Meta: Use these content optimization tips to
generate engagement, conversions, and a bigger audience. Elevate your content
marketing game and your ROI today!
Page Title: Rejuvenating Your Old
Content Could Yield More Traffic Than Creating New – Here's How
It’s a great feeling to see a boost of organic
traffic to a blog article or landing page, but what happens when those rates
start to drop off? Worse yet, what if those numbers never really take off? The solution likely lies in content optimization.
A background in digital marketing isn’t
necessary to significantly elevate your traffic. In fact, a thorough review and
revamping of existing content is often your best opportunity to meet traffic
and conversion goals.
Why Is Content Optimization
Important?
SEO optimization involves taking blog articles
and pages and dramatically improving them for web crawlers. The aims are to
boost overall search rankings and click-through rates (CTRs) while amplifying
the number of “semantically-related keywords” your page ranks for. Google is
constantly crawling your pages, and updating your content with a variety of
strong SEO practices should help your rankings.
If the information in your article is
non-evergreen and doesn’t support the current goals of your business, going
back and making simple fixes lends credibility.
“How Do I Choose an Article to
Optimize?”
There’s not always a hard science for choosing
articles to optimize. You might focus on an evergreen page that once had
healthy traffic but is facing either stagnation or a downward slope. Another
option is to choose a clearly-outdated article and revamp it to meet your
site’s vision and purpose.
To get started, we recommend the following:
“What’s Worth My Time?”
In Search Console, determine the Google
positions of your 20 most popular pages. If your article ranks for
highly-searched keywords and lands on page one or two on Google, there may be
room to overtake your competition. This is especially good news if these pages
haven’t been updated in a while.
Don’t try to “bump up” articles that land a
lot further down on Google search results: They’re likely not worth your time
or resources.
Choosing the Best Keywords for
Optimization
In 2013, Google started prioritizing searcher
intent and exhaustive articles – but that doesn’t mean keyword research isn’t a
crucial part of content marketing! Having a strong list of keywords increases
the chances of sending qualified traffic to your page.
“Where Can I Find the Best
Keywords?”
If you’ve already chosen the pages you’ve
chosen to optimize – or are simply looking at most frequently-visited pages on
your site – go to your Search Console and click on “Queries.” This allows you
to discover the most popular keywords that people currently use to find the
page in question.
Once you’ve determined the main keyword, we
recommend taking advantage of the SEMRush Content Marketing Tool Kit plug-in,
which provides excellent clustering capabilities for users of all skill levels.
These kinds of programs allow you to build out a stronger keyword list and even
find a new angle you may have previously overlooked.
Even if you don’t yet have the main keyword
for your article, determining clusters in advance can keep you from getting too
far away from the initial topic. They may also reveal pieces of information
that might be missing from your original text while presenting excellent
opportunities for future content pieces.
“How Would I Search for this
Topic?”
While keywords are certainly crucial for SEO,
take your audience’s queries into consideration: How are they searching for
your product or website? What are their pain points?
Instead of primarily focusing on keywords as
the ‘be-all-end-all’, use actual human language. A few Google search queries
might reveal a lot more about searcher intent than you’d think. Try it yourself
-- research your topic in Google. Take a look at the top results, the “People
Also Ask” section, and the related searches at the bottom first page of
results.
“Can I Compete With the
Competition?”
No one wants to be told that they won’t rank
for certain short-tail keywords. As soon as you accept this and move on,
however, you can start to focus on keywords that give you a fighting chance.
“How Many Keywords Are Too Many?”
You might think that it’s good practice to
place as many keywords in an article as possible, but that couldn’t be further
from the truth. Overstuffing keywords will only hinder (not help) your efforts.
Ensure that the short-tail and long-tail keywords used in your optimized
content always have a place and a purpose.
13 Tips and Tricks for SEO Page
Optimization
1. Don’t Change the URL
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, we highly
recommend keeping your original URL. It’s simply not worth the risk of 404
errors, loss of domain authority, or plummeting page traffic.
2. Titles and Metas Will Take You
Far
SERP features like SEO
titles and meta-descriptions are known to dramatically increase
click-through rates (otherwise known as CTRs). Take advantage by writing
unique, creative text!
Check out what your main competitors are doing
with these SERP features. Be sure to include both your main and secondary
keywords, but more importantly, make it sound enticing to the uninitiated. The
best practice for great headlines is to make them unique, useful,
ultra-specific, as well as conveying a sense of urgency.
3. Take Advantage of H2s and H3s
While headers might not have the same SEO
power that they used to, there are a variety of reasons to stick with them. Not
only do headers provide easy-to-read formatting structures that keep readers
on-page, but Google also gives priority to ones that use keywords.
4. Get to the Point
Too-long introductions are more harmful than
helpful, and we recommend restricting lengths to around 10-12 lines. This will
help keep readers on-page, which should positively affect your time on page vs.
bounce rate.
5. Make the Reading Process
Easier
White space keeps attention better than a slew
of text, and a variety of sentence lengths and structures (e.g. active,
passive) can hold prospective clients’ focus longer, too. Make sure that your
paragraphs are no longer than six lines, too.
6. Interlinking Is Your Best
Friend
Take this opportunity to check that all
existing links in the original text are still functional and accurate. Solid
interlinking is key for improved navigation purposes and stronger link equity.
Boost your page’s ranking by linking to it
from another well-performing page on your site. Link from the optimized page to
another authoritative page on your site that involves a related topic.
By creating and following a well-organized
structure (like the one below), you’ll provide more opportunities for bots to
crawl high-authority pages.
7. ...so Is External Linking
For external linking, be sure that you’re
citing relevant websites with high domain authorities. Not only does this
practice show readers that your site is reputable, but it also boosts content
promotion. It should go without saying that you should avoid linking to
competitor sites!
8. Lock It Down with Anchor Text
Ensure that your anchor text mirrors the page
you’re linking to. A short, unique phrase is best, and it’s always a great idea
to use keywords wherever they’re applicable. SEO-friendly anchor text is short
yet relevant to the target page.
Keep in mind that to determine the relevance
of the page, Google is looking closely at keywords in the anchor text.
9. Stay Current
Whenever you optimize existing content, be
sure that you’re doing the same for the publication date or the “last updated”
timestamp. Google might defer to you if they’re expertly-written and more
recently revised than competitor pages.
10. Be the Change You Wish to See
There’s no point in writing awesome content if
the visuals don’t match up. Ensure that your design team creates various types
of high-quality images, videos, GIFs, and infographics. Let your company’s
personality shine through – the sky’s the limit!
11. Tell Readers Where They
Should Be Going Next
When you’re signing off any article, there
needs to be a call-to-action (CTA). Whether that’s in the form of a hyperlink,
pop-up, or text box, connect readers to the next step in the funnel with clear
text and action verbs.
Make sure you align the CTA with the general
purpose of the page. Is this content created to serve visitors who have never
heard of your brand? Is it designed for the awareness stage of your customer
journey? In that case, the CTA could offer more information on related topics.
Alternatively, if the page is addressing visitors who are almost ready to
convert, the CTA should offer your services directly.
We recommend regularly testing the efficacy of
your CTAs. Consider A/B testing if you’re torn between two different options.
12. Keep Things Moving
Following the previous steps are well and
good, but they don’t matter if your site speed is crushingly slow. Even one
extra second of load time can cause users to hit the “back” button. Take
advantage of PageSpeed Tools to check how things are
chugging along on both desktop and mobile versions.
13. Optimize for Mobile
Experience
Google is now rewarding mobile-first websites
and uses the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking. This is
crucial, as 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide
was generated through mobile phones in 2018, with the percentages even higher
in the US and Europe.
Think of your mobile audience when optimizing
your content. With limited screen real estate and the expectation of instant
access to information, your mobile readers have even less patience for sub-par
user experience. Make the navigation easy, the sentences shorter, and the font
easy-to-read.
How to Consistently Improve
Readability
Get a Fresh Pair of Eyes
If you wrote the original article, ask a
colleague or associate to give you constructive feedback. Experts often
overlook basic information that might be helpful for first-time readers, and
constructive criticism can help you plan stronger, more thorough articles.
Review Voice and Style
When digging through articles from the last
few years, you may spot multiple articles with similar pieces of information.
Creating a comprehensive “super article” and deleting the remaining ones might
be the right decision.
If you’ve got multiple URLs that are unrelated
to the company’s purpose or unreasonably “thin” (lacking in length), take this
opportunity to rephrase, rewrite, or remove them completely.
How to Measure the Effect of Your
Optimization Efforts
Once you’ve optimized the content, keep an eye
on the page’s performance. Some key behavior metrics to measure will indicate
whether users find the content relevant and interesting. These often include:
●
Pageviews
●
Unique Visitors
●
Bounce Rate
●
Click-through-rate
●
Average Time on Page
●
Pages Per Session
Track your page’s performance with SEO metrics
(e.g. organic traffic, position for top-related queries, backlinking). If
another website has linked to your content after the optimization process, this
is a clear sign that the information on your page is relevant, useful, and
well-organized. All of these factors will help boost a page’s rankings in
Google search results.
To easily monitor your optimized pages,
consider creating a segment in Google Analytics by
adding all of the page URLs that you’ve worked on and continue updating the
segment each time you revamp old content. This way, you can track the
performance of the optimized pages separately from the rest of your website’s
content.
Make SEO Optimization Part of
Your Content Marketing Process
Like most digital marketing practices, there
isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that meets every site’s needs. Our tips and
tricks, however, can help make this process second-nature.
The first step to great content marketing is
getting organized. If everything is neatly coordinated in topic hubs, you’ll
have a better idea of what you’re lacking and what you’re already caught up on.
Using these hubs allows you to think about your site’s hierarchy and the types
of internal linking strategies that should be employed – all before creating
new pieces of content.
Keep a calendar to regularly review pages
(think once per year, minimum), to “fine-tune and prune” everything. Pages with
obsolete or low-quality content that receive no traffic should be removed for
the sake of your website’s health.
If you keep at it, your site content will be
far easier to manage.
Should I Simply Delete
Underperforming Pages?
This is a question we hear a lot. If you
notice that certain pages have had zero organic traffic over the last year, it
might be better to delete them entirely, even if it feels difficult or
counterintuitive. Google views these as low-quality pages, and your site could
be hit with algorithm updates (if it hasn’t already).
While it might hurt a bit to get rid of the
dead weight, remember that it should free up your crawl budget. Whatever you
decide, restricting the number of weak pages on your site improves quality
content density and navigation experience for users.
Feeling Overwhelmed? Hop Online
Can Help!
Many of our clients have been able to increase
their own organic traffic by applying these SEO optimization practices, all
without creating new articles. Optimization takes less time than article
production, can easily be built upon to create expert articles, and – when done
correctly – provides greater organic traffic.
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