Most of the advice I’ve read makes total sense and I wonder why I didn’t think of doing it myself. But there are a few things that get a response from me of “that seems strange.”
Some of those strange things I decided to not do. Others I did, such as this. I started upgrading my older blog posts.
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I've been blogging for several years now and I must confess, my first two years of posts were not so great. The pictures were horrible, they were short, not optimized for SEO, and didn't have a consistent voice.
This is why I have some older blog posts that I don’t promote at all. The problem is many of those posts I don’t promote are still relevant all these years later.
Having all of these old unoptimized posts have been hurting my blog’s organic traffic. This has made me heavily reliant on traffic from platforms such as Pinterest and Facebook. This isn’t sustainable as social traffic can really ebb and flow. This convinced me to follow the advice I was reading to upgrade my blog posts.
To give my blog posts an upgrade I've been going through old posts and doing the following 4 things
When I started going back through several of my older blog posts I found several things that needed to be updated due to mistakes and to match my current aesthetic.
Some of the things I did were
This probably really hurt my blog from seeing some serious growth in the beginning. Thankfully I learned along the way and have been incorporating good SEO practices into new posts I publish. Now it was time to bring those good SEO practices to my older posts.
Here are some of the things I did
Even with some good editing tools at my disposal some of them were a total loss. So I had to replace them with stock images or retake product shots.
By making new images for my blog posts I made my blog aesthetic more cohesive, projected a more professional vibe, and made that content overall attractive to new readers.
I also made the file size of these blog posts smaller than 100k to help with blog speed which is a factor for SEO. To compress my images I use free online tools like imagecompression.org or tinypng.com.
I found a handful of my more popular evergreen blog posts and did everything else I previously talked about Revised the content, in some instances, I rewrote the whole post Adjusted for SEO Created new blog images
After doing all of those things I republished the posts with a current date. This gave the search engines and my readers that there was something new on my blog to check out.
I didn’t change the URLs for these posts so I didn’t have to create any redirects for those posts.
Since I started doing these things I’ve started seeing increases in my organic traffic. In fact, my organic traffic has surpassed my social media traffic.
My last traffic report was in 2017. During that time most of my traffic came from social media, primarily Pinterest. Now it’s reversed where I have a lot more traffic coming organically.
To really see the difference I pulled the below comparison from my Google Analytics
Jan 1 - Feb 21, 2017: Organic traffic = 29.6%, Social traffic = 54.3%
Jan 1 - Feb 21, 2020: Organic traffic = 61.8%, Social traffic = 26.1%
It’s kinda crazy because it’s almost a complete switch in places between my organic and social traffic numbers.
As I continue to go back to my old posts and make these changes and updates I expect to see this trend with my organic traffic continue.
This is why I have some older blog posts that I don’t promote at all. The problem is many of those posts I don’t promote are still relevant all these years later.
Having all of these old unoptimized posts have been hurting my blog’s organic traffic. This has made me heavily reliant on traffic from platforms such as Pinterest and Facebook. This isn’t sustainable as social traffic can really ebb and flow. This convinced me to follow the advice I was reading to upgrade my blog posts.
To give my blog posts an upgrade I've been going through old posts and doing the following 4 things
Updating blog post content
This is a good first place to start. It was for me. Once I’d written a blog post and published it I kinda forgot about it outside of occasionally promoting it. That was a mistake and one I won’t be making again.When I started going back through several of my older blog posts I found several things that needed to be updated due to mistakes and to match my current aesthetic.
Some of the things I did were
- Tweaked the tone of voice. I found that over the last couple of years my writing voice has become more conversational versus my original voice which was more formal.
- Updated information in my posts that were old or outdated. That included updating affiliate links, disclosures, and my inbound links.
- Fixed grammar mistakes. It’s embarrassing to admit there were several misspellings and grammar mistakes in several of my posts. I used a free tool I discovered about a year ago called Grammarly. It called out any and all grammar mistakes in each post.
- Added more information to my posts. Back in the day, I kept my posts short and sweet. Sometimes too short. Many of those older posts didn’t have enough information or context to be really helpful.
Adjusting for SEO
When I first started blogging I knew about SEO but didn’t really understand how it worked. So I really didn’t think about it when writing posts.This probably really hurt my blog from seeing some serious growth in the beginning. Thankfully I learned along the way and have been incorporating good SEO practices into new posts I publish. Now it was time to bring those good SEO practices to my older posts.
Related read: The Importance Of SEO For A Blog
- Revised some headlines. I really didn’t think about my headlines back in the day. I didn’t make sure I included any keywords or made them intriguing so people would want to click and read more.
- Rewrote metatags. These are important to Google and can help with increasing organic traffic. So I updated these to be more informative and to include relevant keywords.
- Added long-tail keywords to posts. Long-tail keywords are essentially phrases or a string of keywords that people use when searching for a topic, product, etc. I got a lot of help in finding long-tail keywords by searching for keywords and seeing what phrases Google suggested.
- Updated inbound or interlinks. Adding links within a blog post to other relevant blog posts can help with SEO and keep people on your blog longer. Some of my older posts didn’t include interlinks because there wasn’t any content to link to or I forgot and didn’t make it a priority.
Creating new blog images
I’m not afraid to admit that most of the pictures I took and used on my blog in the beginning sucked. I mean really sucked. They were grainy, blurry, dark, just totally awful.Even with some good editing tools at my disposal some of them were a total loss. So I had to replace them with stock images or retake product shots.
By making new images for my blog posts I made my blog aesthetic more cohesive, projected a more professional vibe, and made that content overall attractive to new readers.
I also made the file size of these blog posts smaller than 100k to help with blog speed which is a factor for SEO. To compress my images I use free online tools like imagecompression.org or tinypng.com.
Related read: Where Beauty Bloggers Can Find Great Stock Images
Republishing old blog posts
Yep. I read about this from a few other bloggers and decided to try it myself. Republishing blog posts makes sense for evergreen content which is content that isn’t relevant for just a period in time but is relevant through long periods of time.I found a handful of my more popular evergreen blog posts and did everything else I previously talked about Revised the content, in some instances, I rewrote the whole post Adjusted for SEO Created new blog images
After doing all of those things I republished the posts with a current date. This gave the search engines and my readers that there was something new on my blog to check out.
I didn’t change the URLs for these posts so I didn’t have to create any redirects for those posts.
Since I started doing these things I’ve started seeing increases in my organic traffic. In fact, my organic traffic has surpassed my social media traffic.
My last traffic report was in 2017. During that time most of my traffic came from social media, primarily Pinterest. Now it’s reversed where I have a lot more traffic coming organically.
To really see the difference I pulled the below comparison from my Google Analytics
Jan 1 - Feb 21, 2017: Organic traffic = 29.6%, Social traffic = 54.3%
Jan 1 - Feb 21, 2020: Organic traffic = 61.8%, Social traffic = 26.1%
It’s kinda crazy because it’s almost a complete switch in places between my organic and social traffic numbers.
As I continue to go back to my old posts and make these changes and updates I expect to see this trend with my organic traffic continue.