How to Optimize Your New and Old Blog Posts for SEO
More than half of marketers will tell you content is still king when attracting visitors. Their ultimate goal, of course, is to increase incoming leads and make more conversions.
However, generating interesting and relevant content is only part of the process. Optimizing that content for SEO is crucial for appearing in SERPs.
According to Statista, Google is by far the market leader in search engines. In 2022, Google held around 85% of the market share.
It is clear, then, that Google’s metrics surrounding SEO cannot be ignored. This applies to older content as well.
Should you concentrate solely on generating new content for your blog posts?
Producing quality, up-to-the-minute content can keep an audience engaged. Content providing interesting and relevant material, images, and videos can help generate sales.
However, producing new content takes time and energy. It can be hard to generate new ideas constantly. Guest writers can be highly useful in this situation.
When producing content that is SEO-optimized, you need to consider the use of keywords and phrases carefully. H1 tags should be used for titles and H2 for the subheadings. Image alt tags are also critical.
Yet, old posts shouldn’t be ignored either. Revitalizing old blogs could be as important, and maybe more so.
Why do you need to update and optimize your old blog posts?
One study done by Ahrefs showed that the highest-ranking pages on SERPs were around two and three years old. This shows that it isn’t just new content that Google searches for or attracts visitors.
Going back to old content can increase your standings on SERPs without having to produce new ideas. It can push a webpage on page 2 of search results to the front page. And it can also spike interest in a post that has been losing traffic.
How to do this?
Firstly, look at the content itself. Remove out-of-date information, and update facts and figures. You may consider rewriting the introduction completely, or at least in part to inform the reader that the article has been updated.
Look at your keywords next. Google Keyword Planner can help you out in this area.
Check for dead links and add new ones to relevant authorities. Update the images and add video if relevant. Then look at the on-page SEO. Experts such as justrank.my will recommend four key areas for improving SEO on blog posts.
These areas are as follows:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Keyword research
Once Google is aware that your content has been updated, you should start to see a rise in the number of visitors to those posts. If you aren’t up to scratch with your SEO skills though, it may be an idea to use an agency or some outside help.
Is it important to use outside SEO experts for this work?
With the advent of WIX and WordPress, many wonder why they should pay an agency to build and maintain a website.
After all, you could use a WYSIWYG tool to build a website simply. The problem is that sites built this way are often poor in SEO. The individuals behind the builds take little time to understand the various areas of SEO and how they will help generate traffic.
Many say basic SEO can be learned in a few weeks, and of course, practicing will improve and improve understanding.
Properly understanding the intricacies of SEO can take years, though. With Google constantly changing and adding metrics, it is an ongoing learning process.
What do you gain by optimizing your posts for SEO?
Optimizing a blog post will help with your overall SEO strategy. New and updated content will also help retain and attract a new audience.
In short, optimizing old and new blog posts will help you to:
- Rank higher in SERPs
- Gain organic traffic
- Retain your existing audience
- Generate more leads
- Increase conversions
With the relevant keywords carefully used, and the right content, you will show up higher in SERPs. Along with good content can come backlinks.
Backlinks are vital for generating organic traffic from search engines. Good SEO can improve lead generation, and backlinks are crucial here.
However, be clear that these links need to be high quality. To ensure that your backlinks are of good quality, they should link to websites that publish relevant content to yourself and are regarded as authoritative sites.
Summary
Using an agency can be one way of revitalizing old content and gaining insight into optimizing new content.
Yet, some simple tweaks to your content can help improve SEO. Some simple but basic improvements include performing keyword research, updating information, and making sure there are no dead links.
If you take the time to improve your blogs, your overall SEO strategy will benefit you, and you should see a spike in traffic.
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