Content Optimization: 5 Proven Ways to Re-Optimize Content Quickly
- Updated on: 2020-05-23
- Read original article here
Why is content optimization so important?
Over time every piece of content starts losing rankings in the search engines, and your readers stop commenting, sharing, or linking to your content. Over 4 million blog posts are published online every day, and I noticed that in 3-4 months 90% of them don’t get organic traffic at all. As long as you keep creating great evergreen content that makes people talk, you will be successful in content marketing.
But what about the old content that doesn’t generate traffic and doesn’t rank in Google’s top 10 results pages for your target keywords? The decision is to “re-optimize” your underperforming content.
According to acontent studyfrom Pam Vaughan over at Hubspot, 76% of the traffic came from old posts republished a month or more before. Reoptimizing your underperforming content will help you take your content engagement to a new level. Here are some reasons why you should improve your old posts:
When you start evaluating the progress of your content to rank well for particular keywords, ensure to set realistic timescales for your project. It usually takes at least 3-4 months for your content to generate a lot of traffic and appear in Google’s top positions.
In this post, you will discover five amazing tips to re-optimize your old posts and increase traffic to your website.
The best way to keep with the best practices and the latest trends is to dig into your keywords on your blog page. Instead of creating new posts, you can make simple SEO changes using relevant keywords to skyrocket your old post traffic.
To get insights into the user mindset when searching for, it’s essential to look at the search results when re-optimizing content. Once you enter a targeted keyword, check out the top results, and find their similarities from page titles to headings. You can also check the “People also ask” box in Google search results to learn more about the search intent.
Re-optimize your content pages for long-tail keywords. They usually perform well in the search results because they are less competitive and highly specific. Remember that the point of reviving your content is to answer a question, and your keyword phrases should coincide with the problems you’re trying to fix.
To find longer variations for your content, you can use the SE Ranking Keyword Generator. The tool provides a lot of less competitive keywords that generate tons of online traffic. Moreover, you can easily create filters based on search volume, rank value, average keyword competitiveness, and many more.
Check out what similar keywords are working for your competitors. For example, you want to re-optimize your guide that targets the “Roth ira guide” keyword. With SE Ranking, you can find out how your competitors are performing for similar keywords and compare the keyword suggestions using all the metrics that matter.
Another great way to spot relevant keywords is to use achatbot. They help you extract keywords in the question submitted by users. Based on these keywords, you can provide the best possible answer tosatisfy a user’s particular need.
Once you determine relevant keywords, make sure to re-optimize your page titles, headings, meta description, and image alt text. Instead of manipulating search rankings with your keyword phrases, try to focus on providing tremendous value to your audience in your content.
A lot of online marketers consider that having different pages that target the same keyword is a good idea for generating more traffic. Over time these pieces of content end up ranking in the search results for similar keywords and compete with themselves for positions. In other words, it’s better to have one great post than two medium articles.
If you have a few pages that compete with one another, you can do the following:
Consolidating your content is great for many reasons. First, you can provide more useful information in one place, reducing controversy. As well, you can combine all of the links of your pages and increase the overall rankings significantly.
There are some SEO tools likeSE Rankingthat will show your web pages ranking for similar keywords and compare your competing pages quickly. Make sure to look at different keywords that each page ranks, where these pages overlap in rankings and use filters for search volume, competition, and KEI to concentrate on particular keywords.
The best thing about consolidation is that it requires minimal effort to re-optimize your content and achieve great rewards.
The topic cluster model was first mentioned byHubSpotin 2017. It’s a way of organizing your site’s content pages by employing clean site architecture. This approach focuses on creating content around one central topic rather than keywords.
When you take this strategy for your underperforming content, you can help reveal a logical pathway for visitors to follow on your site and let them progress down the sales funnel in a way that’s more advantageous to them. By creating topic clusters, this is also a great way to add more backlinks to your site and amplify theSEO valueof all linked pages.
You can create related cluster content in the form of an external guest post or it can be housed on your own blog. Any way in generating more relevant links to your low-performing content to give it a boost is welcome. Try to create engaging and educational cluster content. This strategic way allows you to deliver a positive user experience through your content.
If your page has a poor headline, no one will read the copy. And the copy that isn’t read doesn’t sell well. From this perspective, it’s critical to create catchy title tags to hook your readers. They play an important role in SEO, and this is the first piece of information users see about your content.
Engaging and persuasive title tags motivate people to click your page and build trust with them. Take the same approach when re-optimizing your content. Try to find new ways to hook your readers and provide more information.
One of the best ways to nudge your search users to click is to use power words. Using the right word in your headline will add more power and improve your CTR. Buffer created a biglist of high-converting wordsand showed the importance of using them in your title tags. Some of them work well when included in your content.
For example, if you have a blog post that doesn’t perform well like this:
You can add power words to your headlines and make them more winning:
Ensure to include your targeted keywords or related keywords in your title tags. This gives search engines a clear understanding of your content’s focus. Don’t overdo with keywords as it can break up your title tag and decrease readability.
Whether you decide to re-optimize your content, make sure that your page loads fast. You know that website speed affects your rankings in search results. Even if you do things correctly and your content is perfectly optimized, but your page load is extremely low, readers will stop visiting and abandon the site.
Improving your old content, run a page speed test withGoogle PageSpeed Insights. This free tool shows how your page loads on desktop and mobile devices and gives recommendations on how to improve your page speed and fix any errors found. For example, Google may offer to fix problems like:
If you aren’t good at technical SEO, review these recommendations with your development team. They can make the necessary changes and improve your page speed.
As the phrase goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. After content re-optimization, this is the first step you should do to track the results and find out whether you outrank your competitors in search results.
To track the performance of your re-optimization efforts, you can use different tools. For example, inGoogle Search Consoleyou can see data for all search queries that generated an impression.
Along with LongTail Pro, you can check the number of ranking keywords you re-optimized and see when ranking improvements come up over time. That will help you make the most crucial decisions about your efforts.
It’s alsoessential to identify how users interact with your content, whether your re-optimized content converts, see the real visitors who take actions on your content page, and reveal those that might be suspicious. Using a free tool calledFinteza, you can get data on user behavior and traffic information to re-optimize future content based on visitor needs.
If you have a lot of existing content that isn’t optimized for the newest strategy, you can get the most out of it by re-optimizing your old posts. While updating content, it’s challenging not to re-create content, but select which pages to re-optimize and which keywords and links to include in your copy.
Using the strategic approach to content re-optimization can help you increase organic traffic, improve rankings, and boost conversions. To get more out of what you have already created, just be a little bit creative with your content optimization!
