Are you trying to find content creators that will get your out-of-date blog up and running again?
If so, you’re not alone.
Many small business owners are sitting on potential gold mines on their websites, in the form of old articles and posts that simply need some tender loving care.
You may not have time to update all your old content, but the rewards are significant.
If a blog overhaul is properly done, you can more than double your organic traffic. According to Backlinko, updating and republishing old posts with new images can result in an increase of 111.37%.
What business wouldn’t love to increase its traffic by over 100%?
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
How Content Creators Work: Overhaul Basics
What does a “blog overhaul” mean in practical terms?
Realistically, this means hiring content creators to bring your old posts up to speed. Then––and this is important––have the content creators continue to post fresh content so that the blog stays relevant.
Updating now won’t help you for the long haul if you don’t continue to add completely fresh content.
The “refurbishing” process can include re-posting old blog entries so that there are new timestamps, and rewriting any titles that may indicate that they’re outdated.
In addition, the content itself may need to be brought up to speed. Maybe you had a high-traffic post that was relevant in 2015, but it’s dropped in the rankings as readers have determined that it’s no longer as useful as it once was (this is especially true of product reviews or anything tech-related.)
And finally, content creators may need to look at your SEO and keywords. It may be the case that you have some great articles that are simply not catching the attention of Google anymore. Perhaps they used to do that, but keywords are dynamic and change over time.
Making sure that you have current SEO attached to your posts can completely change how many people actually see them in the first place.
There are plenty of SEO strategies in play at the moment, but retooling old content can prove to be one of the fastest and most effective.
Update the Date
Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way first: dates in the titles.
If you have a post with a year or date in the title, and it’s no longer current, this is going to hurt your rankings.
For some articles, the content will also need to be significantly overhauled. But for others, you may have evergreen content that simply needs a minor change, and updating the date is high on that list.
For instance, if you have a product review site, and a post that lists the “Best Laptops of 2015,” this is one case where you’re going to need a complete rewrite.
But let’s say your site focuses on personal development for professionals in the workplace. An article with a title like “5 Interview Tips to Land You a New Job in 2014” may still contain a lot of advice that will be useful to readers. But the “2014” piece will have them scrolling past it.
In this case, minimal changes may be helpful, but the big part is simply an update to the title.
The Takeaway
Content creators can make sure that you aren’t giving yourself extra challenges by making the material seem less relevant than it actually is.
Update the Content
In many cases, the actual content of the piece is going to need a refresher.
Content creators can look at a pre-existing article and give it new life. There are a couple of ways to do this.
One is to rewrite the piece and link it to the old one. If you have that “Best Laptops of 2015” article, for instance, this is one area where content creators may create an entirely new article, but then link back to the old one.
Another possibility is that the majority of the content can remain unaltered, but your supporting evidence and stats need to be made current.
Let’s say you have a company that sells safety gear. You might demonstrate the need for your safety products by blogging about what happens when people don’t have access to good gear. If your stats are from 2010, though, your post is going to be less persuasive.
The Takeaway
Content creators can do relevant research to bring those stats (and your post) up to speed again.
Interlink to New Posts
Interlinking is another way that old blogs can gain new traction.
If your blog includes a lot of broken links, it’s going to be less effective. Maybe you’re linking to blog posts that you’ve erased, or products you don’t sell anymore.
Maybe you’ve linked to outside sources that have vanished in the intervening months or years.
In either case, an overhaul can help tidy this up.
Google has become more adept in recent years at identifying sites that simply pack their content with irrelevant links. As a result, links that have nothing to do with your article’s content may actually be a detractor rather than an advantage.
And of course, broken links are frustrating for readers, and should be eliminated or updated whenever possible.
At the end of the day, you want to make your site the best possible experience for readers and potential customers.
That means your external links should be current. Your calls to action and sales links should lead to products readers can buy today. And your internal links should all have some intuitive connection to the blog’s main subject.
The Takeaway
Content creators can make sure that your blog posts contain links that all lead somewhere useful for readers. That gives you a much more effective “user experience” as a result.
Focus on New Trends in SEO
Of course, one of the absolute best ways to rejuvenate a struggling blog is to take a look and see if its keywords are still bringing in traffic.
Keywords fluctuate. One recent trend is that web searchers are using the tag “near me” with far more frequency than they were two years ago (such as a Google search for the phrase “tire repair near me”). Part of this may have to do with the increase in mobile searches, which is expected to continue to rise over the next few years.
If you foresaw this trend years ago and have already incorporated it into your SEO strategy, congratulations. You have psychic powers (or just a very good knack for predicting the future).
But if you’re like most people, you incorporate whatever trends are current in order to get traffic now, and you adapt to whatever changes come your way.
Content creators can look at old posts and figure out what the best SEO keywords will be for that content. Then, using a combination of editing and original material, they can produce a new post that has a much better chance of getting noticed in the current climate.
And if you wrote your posts before you really started to consider SEO strategies, you may lack the necessary keywords entirely. In this case, a re-write can significantly boost a post’s ranking in the ever-changing internet landscape.
The Takeaway
If your content is still current, but your SEO isn’t, you’re missing out on readers and potential customers. Content writers can bring a fresh SEO strategy to your material, breathing fresh life into readership.
Continue Posting Fresh Content Moving Forward
You’ve finished bringing your posts up to date, making sure all your links lead somewhere relevant, and all of your content reflects today’s market. What do you do next?
The answer: keep posting.
Google tracks the frequency with which websites post new material. If Google’s archiving software determines that your website is generating significantly more material than it used to be, it will visit more often. It will archive more often. And you will climb in the rankings.
One of the best ways to get noticed more is to continue to post more and use your new posts to interlink to prior articles that are generating the most inbound organic traffic.
A good content company will help you figure out a strategy to ensure that your website continues to get the attention it deserves.
The Takeaway
Content creators can build on top of a successful “site overhaul” by continuing to create new material, using the most effective SEO available today.
SteadyContent: Your Path to Staying on Top of the Rankings
The best way to get your blog back to the top of the rankings is to hire a team that will look out for you, help you revitalize old posts, and help you strategize for the future.
At SteadyContent, our 550 content creators work on new projects every day.
Many of these are brand-new blogs, but we frequently work with small businesses that published blog material in the past.
If you’re looking to bring new life to an old blog, our writers and editors are here to help. We offer a multi-stage process where we make sure you get the best perspective every step of the way.
First, we use state-of-the-art research tools to identify the right SEO keywords for your blog.
After creating an outline, we send the project over to our writers, who create the body of your post.
And finally, our editors re-read the post with an eye to detail, making sure that all the small pieces are in place.
Whether you’re looking to update an old blog or start a new blog from scratch, we’re here to help you make it the best it can be.
We’re currently offering an introductory “trial package” for businesses that haven’t worked with us before. So give us a call, and see what our content creators can do for you.