Are you searching for new ways to increase traffic to your website? Have you run out of fresh blog post ideas to rank on Google? Well, maybe it’s time you re-optimize old blog posts to attract more visitors.
When you use the following SEO best practices to re-optimize old blog posts, you’ll have refreshed content that can help increase traffic to your website.
Google Loves It When You Re-Optimize Old Blog Posts
As a matter of fact, we first wrote this blog in February of 2016 and have updated the content according to recent best practices for the year 2023.
Search engines like Google, love quality content. And when the content creator follows SEO best practices, that quality content will get indexed in Google almost immediately.
But let me tell you a secret. New content is not the only content that Google loves. When you re-optimize old blog posts, you’ve given Google one of its favorites . . . refreshed content.
When you re-optimize old blog posts, you are breathing new life into your website. And visitor traffic is certain to follow.
A word of warning. Re-optimized content is only effective if the following 3 ingredients are included:
1. Search engines can easily read the content.
2. Your target audience can find the content.
3. The content is easy for your visitors to read.
The #1 Tool to Help You Re-Optimize Old Blog Posts
Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a tool that would check your work as you created or refreshed content to make sure it was correctly optimized?
The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is that tool!
This free plugin automatically reviews your content so you can properly optimize your page for the keyword phrase you’re using. You control how your content is going to look when it shows up in Search:
As you can see from this blog post, the Yoast SEO plugin performs a content analysis that shows you which elements of your content need to be corrected (red) in order to be fully optimized (green).
This makes your content re-optimization process very easy and saves you time.
10 Key Areas You Need to Correct to Optimize Old Blog Posts
Now that we’ve got a powerful optimization tool to help us with the process, let’s look at 10 key areas of our content to get right.
1. In the specified meta description, consider: How does it compare to the competition? Could it be made more appealing?
Your meta description will show up in Search beneath the URL. You’ll want to make sure that the description is enticing, peaks the curiosity of the searcher, and includes the focus keyword so that they are compelled to click on the link and go to your site.
2. You’ve never used this focus keyword before, very good.
Using the same focus keyword in more than one piece of content is not a good thing. If you don’t want to be competing against yourself for a particular keyword phrase, check Yoast’s content analysis to make sure you’re not.
3. The page title is between the 40 character minimum and the recommended 60 character maximum.
Google gives you an approximate 60 character limit for your SEO title. Because the title tag is arguably the most important element of your SEO efforts, we suggest you take advantage of every available character.
4. The images on this page contain alt tags with the focus keyword.
Recent research has shown that Google is placing a much greater emphasis on optimized images in Search. Make sure you’ve got the Alt Text filled out with your focus keyword when you optimize old blog posts.
5. The focus keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy.
Google wants you to make sure your topic is clear immediately. The closer you can put your keyword phrase to the beginning of the first paragraph the better.
6. The page title contains the focus keyword, at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings.
Once again, Google likes the keyword phrase near the beginning of the content. In this case, its at the beginning of the title.
7. The text contains 581 words, this is more than the 300 word recommended minimum.
Although all of us have shorter attention spans these days and usually skim an article for its highlights, Google usually rewards longer articles with higher rankings.
8. The keyword density is 0.7%, which is great; the focus keyword was found 4 times.
While including your focus keyword in your content is crucial to your rankings, Google does not look kindly on pages and posts that over-use keywords. Let the Yoast SEO plugin tell you when you’ve got the right density. With Google’s new RankBrain algorithm, it’s more important to utilize Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI Keywords) and synonyms.
9. You have not used your focus keyword in any subheading (such as an H2) in your copy.
See if you can include your keyword phrase in any of the sub headings. The key here is not to force the phrase into a subheading where it obviously looks out of place.
10. The copy scores 58.5 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered fairly difficult to read. Try to make shorter sentences to improve readability.
One final area you’d want to take a look at is how easy the content is for that average visitor to read. The Flesch Reading Ease test does a very good job of analyzing the text and determining if most people will feel comfortable reading it. You’ll notice that when you re-optimize your old blog posts, the closer you can get to a 11 year-old’s reading level, the higher the score you’ll get from Flesch . . . and Google likes that!
What Next? Market Your Website with Persistence
Well, there you go. Sometimes creating fresh content is just not in the cards. Maybe that’s when you think about going back over some of your ancient articles and re-optimizing them. Use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress to give you the analysis you need to get the job done. Tweak the articles to make them easy for search engines to read, easy for your target audience to find, and easy for them to read. Follow these basics and you’ll be seeing an increase in traffic to your website in no time.
PersistSEO is here to help you with all of your small business marketing needs.Our mission is to create high traffic, content rich websites that generate more leads by implementing persistent digital marketing solutions for local businesses.
Our team of experts knows what works, and we can help your business increase traffic the right way. For more SEO advice, call us today at 770.580.3736, or get our Free SEO Analysis of your website.