Semalt Recommends How To Optimize Old Content And Attract New Traffic
Creating new content is just as important as optimizing an old one. This way, you ensure more web traffic and improved SEO ranking. Indeed, content that has become obsolete because the information is outdated or no longer meets SEO parameters can always be updated or improved so that it generates new visits. In this article, we explain everything you need to know about how to optimize your old content.
On the other hand, would you like to improve your SEO ranking in search engines with the most up-to-date techniques? Visit our Blog to discover the new SEO techniques to adopt. Moreover, we invite you to discover the Dedicated SEO Dashboard, the best all-in-one SEO tool.
Why should you optimize your old content?
The optimization of old content consists in updating part of the information of a publication in order to awaken the interest of the public in it again. Other types of changes are included in this update, such as adding visual material.
The most common one, especially in blogs, is to create new content regularly to generate visits. However, ignoring the old content can be a mistake, as it can attract as much traffic as the new content, if not more, as the updated information is highly valued by users.
Plus, old content has an advantage: age and URL ranking. You're not starting from scratch, but search engines like Google have already detected this content, and it's just a matter of giving it a boost, improving the content and moving it up in positions.
Main benefits of optimizing old content
Among the main benefits of optimizing your old content, we highlight:
- The content offered to users goes from obsolete to current, making it useful and interesting again.
- It is used to improve the content that does not attract traffic and to increase the quality of the web page.
- It is more cost-effective as the time spent on updating the content is less and it is also cheaper compared to the new one.
- Updating the content helps in SEO positioning.
- It is a good resource when there are no ideas for new posts.
All these benefits are the reason why we should optimize our old content. In addition, it should be noted that many visits can come from old posts. If these publications offer updated material, the chances that they will stay on the web and consume more content increases.
We would also like to point out that more and more companies are placing importance on content marketing; this results in millions of new publications every month. This means that creating large amounts of content may not be enough to become visible on the Internet, it is necessary to optimize obsolete content to enhance it and offer news to the public to awaken their interest.
How to detect the content that can be updated?
If you have decided to update some of your content, the first step is to detect which ones are the most appropriate to do so.
Evergreen or "perennial" content is that which does not go out of fashion. For example, we refer to articles that give advice on a certain subject, that explain a concept or the functioning of a program or a tool...
This type of content can always be updated by adding a little more information, new data on some recent related studies on the subject, tables, graphs... It can also be updated at the SEO level to help its positioning. The idea is to save interesting articles for the public that have been forgotten.
You should also look for old publications that have generated the most visits and update them. If they generated a lot of traffic back then, they can do it again now if some changes made can awaken the interest of the audience.
The same process can be done with content that did not generate the expected visits. In this case, it would be very important to analyze the reasons why this content did not get traffic to make it more interesting and attractive. It would also be interesting to do an SEO analysis, analyze the competition, and make a comparison to find out how they managed to position themselves and get traffic that we did not get. But note that improving it does not mean copying and pasting. This work can be very useful for converting old articles that have not generated visits into potential content.
Often, you don't need to change too much a post that was generating visits at the time, just vary its aesthetics a bit and re-share it on social networks or in newsletters. With a new look and feel, users who didn't pay too much attention to it back then can now find it attractive and interesting. By this, we mean that sometimes you don't need to add new information or rewrite part of it, but simply present it in a different way.
How to optimize content?
Optimizing content means improving it so that it is much more attractive and interesting to the audience. By this, we mean that good work is essential to get results. So you need to keep in mind the following:
Update the content
Replace all obsolete data in the article with new ones. You can also keep the old information or data if it will be of interest to the reader, but also add new ones to keep it fresh.
Add visual content
Add visual content: photographs, images, tables, graphs, videos...
Any visual material can make the text easier to read and understand, so add new resources to make it much more attractive.
Develop the content
Evaluate the option to develop the content of the article. Analyze what the competition needs to see if they explain something you don't, check if any of the points need additional explanation and add subsections. Also, investigate the doubts that the public has related to this topic to solve them by adding more information.
Link to other articles
Take advantage of the fact that you are updating your content to create links to other articles that deal with the same topic. Internal links are a way to keep readers on your domain longer and help rankings.
Correct the errors
Read the article you want to optimize carefully and look for errors that might have caused visits to drop or, directly, not to be generated. These can be anything from incorrect data to writing errors. These types of errors undermine credibility and create distrust in public, so they must be corrected.
Check the referencing
Keywords are very important to get a good ranking. In fact, before writing any type of content, it is very important to conduct an SEO analysis. Review and update this part with the help of a better tool such as the Dedicated SEO Dashboard.
Check the URL
Make sure the main keyword you want to position this content with appears in your URL.
Make sure you meet all the SEO requirements on the page: add an SEO title and a meta description with an acceptable number of characters. It is also very important that the text is structured with H2, H3, H4... for easy reading and that the images have a title and an Alt attribute. Make sure that keywords appear in each of these parts, taking into account the standards to strengthen the positioning.
It will not always be necessary to change everything, because maybe the URL, SEO and visual content, for example, are good, but what fails is that some of the content is outdated or some points need to be developed. So before making any changes to an article, a preliminary analysis should be done to know which parts need to be improved.
How does optimization benefit your web traffic?
Google values updated content and prefers to display the most recent information, so it will be much easier to position the article. And the better the article is positioned, the more visits it will receive.
In addition, it is not the same to publish content from scratch as to update an existing one since the latter is part of the one that already has some degree of authority, so it will be much easier to position it. We must also add that, as we have already mentioned, Google likes content to be up to date and highly appreciates this type of action.
It has also been verified that websites that regularly update their content and manage to position themselves better strengthen their brand reputation. Indeed, the first results proposed by a search engine generate more trust for the user than those that appear in lower positions. Moreover, few people reach the second page of results, hence the importance of achieving a good position.
Of course, when an article is updated, the audience should be informed so that they know there is new information in this old content. A newsletter can be sent to subscribers with the link to this article, which will already generate traffic. It can also be shared on social networks so that users will share, comment and react to it, getting more reach and, therefore, more visits.
We could say that content optimization consists in reviving a publication that, for some reason, no longer generates visits or they have been considerably reduced. It is undoubtedly an action to take into account in order to improve web traffic and generate more trust and credibility with the public.
If you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.