Ranking Boost— Improve Your Old Content

Halloooos,

Greetings from Ottawa.

How’s your week been?

I am getting my vaccine tomorrow - the first dose, though - so I am excited.

Looking forward to gaining some form of immunity against the ‘virus-that-won’t-be-named.’

All right, that’s that.

On to the business:

How to Improve Your Old Content

One way to boost your website/blog rankings is to improve (update) old content.

Unfortunately, it’s one tactic many are wont not to try.

Well, this week, I spent five hours combing through Google Analytics (GA) at work, reviewing all the blog pages on our website, and comparing their traffic stats from Jan - May 2021.

It was quite a revealing exercise. Plus, I learned a new framework.

Now looking forward to merging some of the old posts into new, refreshed articles that hit the tunes we’ll be playing for our readers for the rest of 2021.

Before we get into the framework I used, here are some great answers I got when I asked for help on the Some Good Content group (run by John Bonini of DataBox):

“Is there an opportunity to merge them with posts on a related topic? These help clean up the domain while also strengthening other posts that may be ranking”

John Bonini

“As John said, try to merge them with similar posts and redirect the URL there. If this isn't possible you can also unpublish them and use the content for guest articles on someone else's site (or somewhere like Medium).”

Damien Elsing

“1) See if you can upgrade the posts with new keywords but minimal effort - the ones that are irrelevant or with no traffic.

2) The ones that are old but get some traffic or rank for certain keywords, try and club them to a larger cluster that you've running successfully. This may require some content upgrades but you just might be able to salvage that traffic.”

Deb Mukherjee

Now, here’s the framework I used

Look, you could get more detailed than what follows, but here goes:

Step #1: Audit your blog

I used Ahrefs and GA to check for:

• Is the title optimized for a search intent/reader’s benefit?

• What’s the number of page views per article?

• Does the article have backlinks or internal links?

• Is the URL SEO-friendly?

Step #2: Evaluate the quality of each piece

This part is exhausting. Here, I check each article for:

• Is it evergreen or outdated?

• Is it readable?

• Is it shareable?

• Is it relevant to the blog theme?

• Is it informative or fluff?

• Does it solve the reader’s problem?

It’s also helpful to incorporate Google’s approach to defining quality content when evaluating for quality.

Google’s quality ratings are defined by:

• Expertise (unique information, knowledge, or skills)

• Authority (Does your audience recognize your knowledge or skills?)

• Trust (Does your audience endorse to trust what you say, do and sell?)

Step #3: Split your content into four buckets

At this point, you should have enough data to split your content into:

🪣 Content that doesn’t need any extra work (accurate information, good traffic, quality backlinks, ranks 1 - 5, generates conversions)

🪣 Content that needs an update/refresh (outdated content, average traffic, and engagement, ranks between page 1 and page 2 of Google, generates some conversions)

🪣 Content that needs to be rewritten (gets little traffic, no engagement, no conversions, no backlinks, or losing backlinks)

🪣 Content you’ll need to merge (multiple pages on one topic with little or no traffic, no engagement, no conversions)

Makes sense, compadre?

Next week, I’ll share how we’ll be approaching the three buckets that need work.

Did You Know?

Yesterday, I found out that you don’t need to include your primary keyword in the first sentence of your blog post. I know I am probably late to the party, but…

Here’s a snapshot from Brendan Hufford’s article:

You can read the full piece here.

Content tools

A content tool I discovered this week

The Keyword Density Analyzer ensures your pieces are never stuffy. So could you give it a spin and let me know?

Not Enough Writers

And we go again.

Tomorrow…the brilliant Michaela Mendes will be joining us on ‘The Pitch Series’ to talk about the art of pitching ideas/topics to editors.

Join us…here’s the sign-up link.

Content writing jobs (Remote/Freelance)

✅ Contract Content Writer, Boulo Solutions | Apply here

✅ Content Creator, Baracademy | Apply here

✅ Technical Writer, Tyken Group | Apply here

✅ Content Writer, InspireMore | Apply here

✅ Content Marketers, Link-able | Apply here

✅ Freelance Writer, Finder | Apply here

All the best, folks. And please share with any of your friends/colleagues who might find this useful 🙏🏾

My biggest takeaway this week 🚀

Discipline is remembering. Create systems that remind you of what you need to get done.

What I’m thinking about?

Focus turns good performers into great performers.

What’s your biggest content marketing challenge?

Reply to this email. Let me know what you’d like me to cover next.

I read every reply.

Thanks for reading this far. I am grateful!

Stay safe and sane.

I’ll be back on June 11th.

Dozie

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