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5½ Tips for Optimizing Historic Blog Content

5½ Tips for Optimizing Historic Blog Content

by | May 10, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Logistics, Marketing, Supply Chain

An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.

We all know that creating original content on a regular basis is important to improving SEO and attracting organic traffic to your website. But, here’s a surprise: Most of your traffic will come from older blog posts.

An important part of your content strategy should be optimizing historic blog content to ensure it’s attracting as much traffic as possible.

If you have a lot of content, that may scare you. (Sounds like a lot of work!) But, as with everything, being strategic about optimizing historic blog content will pay off many times over. Here’s how I suggest going about that.

Pick your posts

At Fronetics, about 80% of our traffic comes from posts that are 6 months old or older. HubSpot also discovered a similar trend: 76% of its monthly views came from old posts, as well as 92% of the company’s monthly leads!

[bctt tweet=”76% of HubSpot’s monthly views come from old posts and 92% of their monthly leads.” username=”Fronetics”]

But not all posts were created equal. In fact, HubSpot found they got about half of their monthly leads from only 30 posts, and they blog at a blistering pace of about 200 new posts every month. Going back and optimizing hundreds of your old posts is a waste of time.

Hunt through your analytics and look for historical blog posts with:

  1. High traffic and high conversion rates: Readers view these posts often and convert frequently after reading them. Found any of these? Congrats. Most companies won’t have more than 1 or 2.
  2. High traffic but low conversation rates: These are the posts are viewed often but don’t generate leads.
  3. Low traffic but high conversion rates: These posts only garner a small number of hits but do well generating leads due to a higher-than-normal number of call-to-action click-throughs.

All set? Have a list of good blogs to work with? Here comes the fun part!

5 tips for optimizing historic blog content

Here are 5 tips to squeeze the absolute most out of your older blog posts (in terms of leads and conversions).

1. Update the content.

Rework it for today. Take out anything outdated and use a little finesse to make it more relevant. Don’t overhaul it; that’s unnecessary for a well-performing post.

2. Spice up the call-to-actions.

You’ll want to pay special attention to this for the posts that have high traffic but low conversion rates. CTAs have evolved. Old ones just aren’t going to appeal.

Revamp the CTA placement and appearance, and think (hard) again about your CTA content. Consider the language of the CTA and whether it fits the reader’s goal. What keyword(s) are they using to find the page? And does the CTA reflect this?

There’s so much information out there on making strong CTAs, but the bottom line is the CTA must match the intent of the audience.

Keep it bold. Keep it clear. And make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse.

3.  Relook at your keywords.

For the posts that do well converting leads but don’t get a lot of traffic, you’ll need to take a fresh look at keywords.

Trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out. But it still has merit here, as long as you understand it within the larger picture of restructuring your website content into topic clusters and pillar content.

People are changing how they search, and search-engine-optimizing these old posts to get more visibility is the goal.

And here’s the beauty of optimizing historical blog content: You already have the data to know which keywords your audience are using to find the posts. Then prominently feature the keyword(s) in several places.

4. Update your posts’ meta descriptions.

If you’ve done the hard work to update the CTA and the keywords, updating the meta description is a natural next step. Keep it as close to (but not over) 155-165 characters. Include your keyword(s). Explain the value of the post to the reader. And keep in mind your ultimate CTA goal. Everything should align to make the meta description a true synthesis of the post; if it doesn’t, go back and tweak a little more.

5. Republish and keep the URL.

Things that are “fresh” receive preferential treatment from Google. (We know it’s hard to believe when 2012 articles are at the top of your search results, but it’s true.)

But do not lose that original URL when you publish again. It pulls way more SEO “rank” than a new one. Keep the URL even if you updated the title of the post and the URL doesn’t match perfectly anymore. It’s OK.

(It’s not a bad idea to put in an editor’s note at the end of the article if the blog already has garnered comments, so your future audience won’t be confused by a publish date that is later than the date on the comments.)

And that’s it. 30 days after optimizing your historic blog content, go back and see how successful your efforts were. Track the metrics: post views, CTA click-throughs, lead generation, and keyword ranking. We’re betting they’ve gone up.

Measuring the success of your SEO strategy shouldn’t be done by measuring the success of one post at a time. But making the most of your best old posts is an important part of any good content marketing strategy.

Final tip

The final tip isn’t really about optimizing historic blog content, so let’s call it a ½ tip. Remember how Tip 1 recommended reworking the old posts but warned against overhauling them with large rewrites?

Well… Here’s the thing. If you have 12 historic blog posts you just optimized, you should write 12 new blog posts on that same content, too.

Recycle that good historic content into additional fresh content. After all, it’s what your audience is searching for!

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effective content strategy

Infographic: 4 Ways to Measure Blogging ROI

Infographic: 4 Ways to Measure Blogging ROI

by | Mar 22, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy

Your blogging ROI isn’t as easy to calculate as click-to-conversion, but these four metrics can help you measure whether you’re getting your money’s worth.

“Exposure and engagement is key when it comes to measuring ROI. Simply publishing a blog post isn’t enough of a success. You have to go deeper and pay attention to things like social share metrics, engagement metrics, and actual conversions that can be tied to the content you’re producing.” — Colin Mathews, Co-Founder, Content Marketer

Why do you blog? It seems like a simple question, but the answer has a huge impact on the content you produce and the outcome of your efforts.

As with all aspects of your business, you should give the return on investment of your content marketing efforts ample attention. That is especially true for blogging ROI, if generating new business is indeed one of the reasons you blog in the first place.

With 53% of marketers saying blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority, it’s crucial that you’re making sure your hard work is worth the time and money you’re spending on it.

Let’s face it, blogging isn’t free. Creating relevant and interesting content for your blog is highly demanding. The people working to sustain your blog and engage with new audiences through your content are spending valuable time and money. If you want to ensure that these efforts are producing results, it’s imperative to calculate the impact of your blogging on your bottom line.

Calculating blogging ROI isn’t as straightforward as other ROI analysis. You simply can’t rely on click-to-conversion data to give you the full picture. But your blog achievements can be measured in other ways. Here are four categories to measure the effectiveness of your blog.

Infographic: 4 ways to measure your blogging ROI

(Made with Canva)

Final Thoughts

While it can feel a little unwieldy to measure blogging ROI, keeping a strong focus on your goals and objectives will help to lend weight to metrics that ultimately matter the most to you and your business.

Whether you’re looking to generate leads or attract first-time site visitors, your blog is a great place to boost engagement and expand your reach. Focus on making your blog as valuable as possible for your target audience, and you’ll be able to measure the fruits of your labor.

How does your company measure blogging ROI?

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The More Often You Publish Blog Content, the More Leads You’ll Get

The More Often You Publish Blog Content, the More Leads You’ll Get

by | Jan 18, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing

With a high correlation between publishing frequency and web traffic and leads, you need to publish blog content more often to boost lead generation efforts.

Here are Fronetics, most of our clients are sales-driven. If a client’s business goals include earning leads, we are sure to align the client’s content strategy with that objective. One of the most effective ways to increase the number of leads your website attracts is to increase the frequency with which you publish content.

It seems simple, right? The more often you publish blog content, the more traffic and leads you’ll get. Search engines consider posting frequency in their rankings. What’s more, every time you post, you create a new opportunity to be found, shared, and linked by other sites.

The more you publish blog content, the more they’ll read.

Recent studies have shed light on the relationship between publishing frequently and increased web traffic and leads:

  • HubSpot’s benchmarking data shows that blogs that publish 16+ times per month receive 3.5x more traffic than those that publish weekly or less often.
  • From the same report, companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get about 4.5X more leads than companies that publish between 0-4 monthly posts.
  • Curata’s survey of 400+ marketers found that 90.5% of the most successful business blogs (over 10,000 views per month) publish at least once a week.

But we know there are challenges to posting frequently.

Publishing blog content frequently comes with its own set of challenges. Time is the biggest obstacle we hear from our clients. Good blogging should be more of a conversation than a press release, but dialogue takes time to create. It can also require additional time to respond to readers’ questions and comments.

The other big challenge is quality. When you’re producing more and more content, it’s easy to let the quality of your pieces slip. You want to make sure the content on your blog is relevant, informative and engaging. It can be difficult to balance publishing frequently and maintaining value and quality.

So how do you find the balance?

Start small. We often encourage our clients to publish blog content just one more time per week. Though some are skeptical of the impact this will have on their traffic and lead-generation efforts, they inevitably find that such a small step can make a big difference.

And no, you don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to start seeing the impact of your blog posts on your leads. The HubSpot benchmarking report found that increasing posting frequency had the biggest impact on smaller businesses: Companies with 10 or fewer employees that published 11+ posts per month had almost 3X more traffic than companies publishing 0-1 monthly posts, and about 2X as much traffic as those publishing 2-5 monthly posts.

Take one client of ours for example. We suggested moving from publishing one post to two posts per week. The client was unsure this would have any impact, especially for a company in the supply chain industry. But the immediate results spoke for themselves. After just one month, traffic increased by 23%, sales leads doubled, and the client landed a new customer.

Try our suggestion and publish blog content one more time per week, then let us know how it works out for you. We’d love to hear about your success.

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