How to Elevate Your Old Blog Content For SEO to Drive Organic Traffic

As the CEO of a digital marketing agency, Madeleine Costa is dedicated to helping people, students, and small businesses thrive. Madeleine founded Succeeding Small with a simple mission: help small businesses get the visibility they deserve through search engine optimization, web design, paid advertising, social media, and more. With a personal and family history rooted in entrepreneurship, she strives to lift up small businesses digitally through integrity-filled marketing services and empowering education. With her degree in English and Marketing, Madeleine is a proud SEO enthusiast, rhetorician, and avid learner.

You’ve put a ton of time into creating the perfect blog post, but now it’s languishing in your website’s archives. Maybe people loved it years ago. They shared it on social media and commented like crazy, and it was one of your most popular posts. But now the traffic has dwindled, and you’re wondering how to breathe life back into it.

What can you do to ensure you get the most out of the content you’ve created? The good news is that you can use blog search engine optimization (SEO) to optimize your old blog content and drive more traffic to your website. And it’s not as challenging as it sounds.

Simply put, old content should work for you. Therefore, your SEO strategy needs to include room for optimizing old content. By understanding the basics of how to go about optimizing old content for SEO, you can make sure that all of your blog posts continue to work hard for your digital presence.

Here are a few tips to consider when optimizing old blog content for SEO. But first, let’s look at what blog optimization is and its importance.

What is Blog Search Engine Optimization?

Blog SEO, or blog optimization, is the process of making sure your blog content is fully optimized for search engines. This includes:

• Updating the copy with relevant data
• Adding keywords
• Optimizing images● Writing meta descriptions and title tags
• Improving page load speed
• Adding internal and external linking, and so much more

All these things work together to improve the visibility of your blog posts in search engine result pages (SERPs). The more optimized and relevant your content is, the higher it will be ranked in search results. That’s more eyes on your blog post and more organic traffic to your website.

Why is Optimizing Old Blog Content Important?

This is the ultimate question. Why should you spend limited time and energy optimizing blogs when you could be publishing new ones? After all, fresh content is vital to your SEO strategy, too. The answer is simple. Optimizing old blog content increases your chances of being found in search engines. And who doesn’t want that?

Optimizing old blog content for SEO ensures that it remains relevant, up-to-date, and valuable for readers. Also, it gets you a bunch of clicks. Even moving from the 10th to 9th position in Google’s Top 10 results is 11% more clicks, and 9th to 8th is a whopping 23.6%.

Therefore, the more relevant, up-to-date content you have on your website, the more likely search engines will recognize it as a valuable resource for searchers. That means more organic traffic to your website!

Also, remember that it takes time for content to start ranking on SERPs. Even the best, most-optimized piece of content still takes months to appear on Google’s Top 10. The average page in Google’s Top 10 links is over two years old.

So, don’t give up on old blog content. It’s worth investing the time to optimize content and make sure your pages are as visible as possible. After all, if you’ve already put time and energy into creating content, why not make sure it continues to work for your website?

7 Tips for Optimizing Old Blog Content For SEO

So, we’ve covered what blog SEO is and why you must be doing it for a solid content
strategy. Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to go about optimizing your old blog content for SEO.

1. Find One Main Keyword

The first step in your blog optimization checklist is to find one main keyword or phrase for each blog post. You need to pick one keyword to optimize your content around. You can use a keyword research tool like Keywords Everywhere to help you find the best phrases relevant to your content and related to what people are searching for.

Remember that search engines are looking for authority and relevance. As such, they only like it when you target a few keywords in one post. On the other hand, they get confused if you target too many keywords and won’t recognize your post as relevant. Therefore, stick to one main keyword and ensure it’s used throughout the content.

For example, say you’re re-writing an old blog post about the power of SEO for small businesses. If your primary keyword is “SEO for small businesses,” don’t go off and include keywords on social media content creation, as those don’t relate to the post topic. Instead, stick to what would add relevant value.

2. Update Your Content

Once you’ve identified your main keyword, it’s time to update the content. Don’t go overboard adding your main keyword all over the place. Instead, focus on making the content sound natural and adding other relevant terms related to your keyword.

Using the example above, this may include sections on what SEO for small businesses is, why it’s important, and tips on how to get started. Remember, you’re looking for ways to add value to readers while optimizing your content for search engines.

Plus, Google doesn’t like keyword stuffing. It’s a negative rank signal, which means Google will penalize your blog if you do it. That’s the opposite of getting visibility.

Of course, update any research or data used in the post to ensure it’s current and correct for your audience, too!

3. Compress Images

One of the most overlooked aspects of SEO is image optimization. Not only are images a great way to break up text and make your blog more visually appealing, but you can also optimize them for SEO.

Start by giving your image a relevant title and file name. Then, add an alt text description for the image. Doing so will help search engines understand what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

Another way to optimize images is by compressing them. Image compression reduces the size of your image without sacrificing quality. Because pictures, on average, make up 21% of a page’s weight, compressing them can help your page load faster.

Faster loading times mean better user experience and higher rankings in search engines. Luckily, there are a bunch of tools and plug-ins that can help you compress your images for SEO, like TinyPNG or WP Smush. Try also to pick a plugin that compresses images on its own servers so you don’t increase load time on your site.

4. Optimize For Page Speed

That leads us to the next tip — optimizing for page speed. Page speed optimization is an important SEO factor because it directly impacts user experience. Simply put, sites that load faster get more traffic and better rankings in SERPs.

For example, just a mere 5 seconds delay in page load time can lead to a 38% drop in website traffic. Therefore, you’ll want to ensure your website is in good shape to load fast. Here are some tips:

• Start by compressing images and reducing the size of large files like videos and PDFs.
• Use a good hosting platform that doesn’t overload your server with requests.
• Consider using caching plugins to help speed up loading times; plugins like WP
• Rocket are popular for this purpose.

You can also use website speed testing tools to measure your page speed and get tips on how to improve it. Popular options include:

• GTmetrix
• Pingdom
• WebPageTest
• Google’s PageSpeed Insights

5. Use Internal Links

Internal links are an essential aspect of SEO. They help search engines understand the structure of your website and determine how pages are related to each other. They can also help users find more relevant content on your site and establish your authority.

Google loves a site with a good internal linking structure because it can crawl and index pages better. Google divides link value between internal links too. So you want to spread link value throughout your site by linking from one page to another.

For example, if you want a blog to rank faster, try linking it to your homepage. Because your homepage is often the most linked-to page on your site, it will pass some of its link value to other pages.

On that same note, you’ll want to keep your internal links up-to-date and remove any broken ones from blogs. You can use third-party tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog to help you find broken internal links.

6. Update Your Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

Meta descriptions and title tags are critical for SEO and your audience. They tell search engines and readers what your page is about, which helps them decide if it’s relevant to the search query.

You’ll want to ensure your meta descriptions are well-written and optimized for both search engines and users. Keep them concise yet informative. A recent study shows that title tags and meta descriptions with the highest click-through rate are between 40-60 characters.

Try to include primary keywords in your title tags too. When you have keyword-rich titles, search engines better understand your content and can rank it higher. Users are also more likely to click on results with titles that contain their keywords since it’s more relevant to their query.

Additionally, make sure to use unique title tags and meta descriptions for each page. Duplicate content should be avoided. Instead, creating individual titles and descriptions for different posts or pages on your site is best.

7. Track Your Performance

Finally, tracking your performance and seeing how your blog is doing in terms of SEO is essential. If you don’t know what’s underperforming or doing well, you won’t be able to optimize it to get better results.

You can use several tools to track your performance, including Google Analytics and SEMrush. You can also use Google Search Console to track how your content is performing in the SERPs and get insights on its visibility.

These tools will help you measure your traffic, identify new opportunities, and understand what works. With that data, you can make more informed decisions when optimizing old blog content for SEO.

The Bottom Line About Optimizing Old Blog Content For SEO

If you haven’t included room for past blog optimization in your SEO strategy, you need to start now. It’s one of the most effective ways to get more organic traffic flowing to your site. You’re literally three times more likely to see results by updating your old content.
It’s not hard, either!

By following the tips above, you can optimize past blogs for SEO and make your old content work for you. Remember to evaluate your page speed, use internal links, update meta descriptions and title tags, and don’t forget to track your performance! Consistency is key here. With a little effort, you’ll be able to make old content visible again in no time.