Sometimes in the quest to be create content for your website, we sometimes, and needlessly, run into road or mental blocks when it comes to new content. The burden or strain to drive website traffic to your latest content always has people focused on what’s new; the latest and greatest. More often than not it’s our old content that can be a catalyst for generating more website traffic,
How does one even know where to begin? The simplest answer is to, if you have some sort of analytics tracking on your site, to look at the data and see which old posts are still getting traffic, but not like before and start there.
But if content is old and out dated, how can it generate more traffic? Well, that’s a great questions and here are some ways to make something old, new again.
Refresh Your Content
Sometimes your blog post just needs some spring cleaning. A little update here and there to make it relevant and “new” again. Often times we just post our content and forget to go back to it. It could be your post ranked really well when you first posted it, but perhaps some of the content is outdated. Why not update it to what is going on today thus making it more relevant again? It’s a lot easier to tweak something that was already written than it is to stare at a screen trying to come up with new and creative content.
Refresh how is probably what you’re thinking? There are many ways you can refresh the content of your blog post to bring it up to date.
- Remove out dated content
- Change the keyword to better searched for term
- Rewrite the intro paragraph
- Add new and relevant content
- Rewrite your title and meta description
- Update your subheadings
Internal Linking and Checking for Broken Links
There is always a great opportunity to add some internal links from your new content to your old content. By adding new links to your old content it keeps users on your site longer, helps to boost your content quality, and improves SEO; which is always a great thing.
Is there a person out there today who doesn’t get frustrated when they click on a link to a topic or keyword they’re interested in and it leads to a 404 page not found error?
If it’s a link to a page that no longer exists then why is it your problem you may ask? Because Google will look at that and see you have broken links and that you haven’t fixed it so it deems your content isn’t worthy enough to rank.
Tip: If you’re a WordPress user, and a lot of us are, there is a plugin called Broken Link Checker. This is a great tool to help check your site for broken links and let’s your update the links or delete them altogether.
Update Your Images
Remember 80’s fashion and how we thought it was so cool back then? And now we look at it and think, “What in the hell were we thinking?” Am I right? Your blog post images are the same way.
Just like it’s time to update that family portrait it might be time to update the images on your blog post with better looking ones that are more up to date than a senior picture that is 90% hair sprayed hair only.
And while you’re in there don’t forget to add/update your ALT text for all your images. ALT text are a great way to help the website crawlers and boost your SEO.
Promote and Promote Some More on Social Media
Again, it’s easy to get transfixed on what is shiny and new. We all do. Just posting your content once to social media isn’t going to generate the consistent website traffic you’re looking for. These may not be the droids you’re looking for but this is the website traffic you are looking for.
If you want consistent traffic from social media you have to be consistent. Read that again and again.
There is no rule or law on social media that says you can’t tweet or pin a blog post again once it’s been published.
And what is even better is that instead of struggling to come up with things to post or tweet about on this day or that day, you can bring that old blog post topic up and post it as if it was new.
You Can’t Save Them All
Unfortunately you can’t save or refresh every one of your old blog posts. Some posts need to be put down like Old Yeller. There are just some topics that are no longer relevant and you just have to delete them and add a redirect.
If the content is no longer performing at all or even performed that well before; it’s probably best to let it go Elsa. Just let it go.
Image by marymarkevich on Freepik