How I Grew Website Traffic 60% by Editing an Old Content [11 Tips]

As a digital marketer, you might have heard that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than acquire a new one. The same goes for content marketing. It’s much easier to reuse old content than to publish new content.

If you’re blogging regularly, then you may have tons of blogs in your archives. Editing old content can help in increasing blog traffic by 60%.

Though fresh content is certainly needed at regular intervals of time, recycling old content can do wonders when you’re looking for ways to boost your reach.

In this article, I have mentioned the 11 best ways which I’ve implemented myself to boost blog traffic by editing old content.

1. Keep keywords in Title Tag

Title tags are the most critical element for both user experience and SEO. If you feel the need to change the blog post’s title, try to keep keywords from the original while the URL is more important to keep the same.

As your Title tag are representatives of your blog page, make sure that your title tag is relevant to your content. It should be catchy, short and to the point. Stats show that users click on titles that are short, and thus this method will surely boost your conversion rates and traffic.

By way of an example, let’s look at posts on co-browsing practices.

As you can see, optimizing the title tag and adding the keyword can boost the rank of your old blog post.

2. Optimize Posts’ Meta Description

After editing the old blog, review the blog post’s Meta description. Is it still accurate? If you feel you can still make it a bit catchier, change it.

Remember, Meta descriptions do not affect the ranking of your content, but it affects the click-through rate from the search. Make sure you write a Meta description, keeping in mind what’s within the post.

Recommended: SEO Best Practices

Ideally, a Meta description should be appealing and descriptive so that it gives a clear understanding of what the content is all about.

Another example from my blog on facts about live chat is Google displays this.

If someone searches for facts about live chat, those lines will convince the users and will make them click on my post.

If your blog post does not convince the user and no one clicks on it, it is a complete waste of time.

3. Add more images with an alt tag

Images can generate a lot of traffic. So putting more images with alt tags in the blog post can boost traffic.

Search engines can’t read the image the way they read a text. So it is important that you add alt tags to images to make search engines understand what the image is all about.

Recommended: Top 11 Websites You Can Download High-Quality Images For Free 

4. Add a famous quote so people can tweet

This is one of the best ways to boost blog traffic. By adding relevant famous quotes in your blog post, there is a great chance that people will tweet those quotes and thus, this way, you can attract more visitors to your blog post.

5. Add table of content

As bloggers or website owners, we want that the content appears on the first page in the search results. There are many factors that play into getting your content ranking on the first page.

After I found that most pages that rank on the first page have a table of contents, I also tried it out for myself and added a table of content in older posts, and I found that it ranked on the first page in 4th position. Creating a table of content can easily be done in WordPress using a plugin.

6. Extend and Update your content

Add more content to old posts to make them more informative and longer and rank higher in search engines. Remove any outdated information and add up-to-date information. Google loves longer, informative posts. Add useful, current information to your old content in order to boost blog traffic.

You can create subsections within your blog post. This is a great way to extend your content with some natural ideas.

Similarly, Google suggestions and related searches at the bottom of a search result can be good places to look for additional content ideas.

7. Update the featured image

Change the feature image of old blog posts. If you’ve been blogging for many years, your brand may have changed since you published your old blog posts.

Update your image to match your current brand. Create featured images that are consistent with your current color scheme and fonts.

8. Share on all the social media platforms

After editing your old post content, share it on all social media platforms.

Research done by Tom Tunguz shows that promoting content again and again can boost up 75% of the engagement of the first post.

For example – if you have invested $2000 in writing an article or blog, and if that article or blog was a big hit with your audience, use or social media platforms to repost the link.

Make sure you change the title and update the content each time you share your post. This approach will surely boost traffic.

9. Do some fresh keyword targeting

Research some fresh keywords relevant to your post and target those keywords in your content. This is a great way to make your blog content more relevant and recognizable by Google.

Recommended: How to Rank Your Website Effectively With Long-Tail Keywords

To get started, go to Google Search Console. Then click on “Search Analytics” under the “Search Traffic” section.   Find the same page that you used to make out which posts you want to optimize.

Now click the post, and change your selection from “Pages” to “Queries.”

Next, sort the results of keyword queries by impressions. Those queries that are getting the highest number of impressions show up at the top of the page.

Check the keyword that comes on top to see whether it’s relevant to the content or not. If it’s relevant, then it should be your focus keyword.

The rest of the keywords will become secondary keywords that you can add here and there in your blog post.

Follow this tactic for each of the posts you want to optimize.

Next, find completely new keywords.

10. Optimize old posts for new keywords

Once you’ve found the keywords, you can update posts with new keywords using Yoast’s WordPress plugin. All you need to do is enter a keyword that you are thinking about using, and it will give you tons of recommendations.

Now eliminate any red or orange points by making improvements. This plugin is free, which is a pretty great advantage.

11. Improve Readability

Lastly, work on improving your site’s readability. Break your content into paragraphs. Keep each paragraph to about 5-6 lines. Maximize your reader’s experience with short, easy-to-read paragraphs.

Conclusion:

These are some of the ways which can help you to optimize your old content and can help double your traffic and conversion rates.

Once you improve your older content, you can utilize it in many ways. You can add these updated blog posts to a “popular posts” section on your sidebar, share them in a newsletter, and many more.