You must be busy publishing new blog posts on your blog with the intention to drive more traffic from search engines. But are you tracking the performance of your old blog posts?
As time passes, lots of our old blog posts lose their rankings, which results in you getting less traffic coming to those posts from search engines. If you are facing this kind of problem on your blog, be sure to keep on reading….
Monitor Performance Through Google Analytics
It's time to monitor the performance of old blog posts using Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you should be able to see how your blog posts are doing over the period of time. You should check the Organic Keywords report which is placed under Acquisition. Since most of keywords data is gone from Google Analytics, so you should filter this report by “Landing Page”.
By now, you should have clear cut idea of which of your old posts are still doing well on search engines and which one’s are losing ground.
Re-Work Those Old Blog Posts
You should make a list of all old blog posts that are losing traffic from search engines. Start with the blog post that lost the maximum amount of traffic and rework that blog post with the intention of adding more value to it. Since you know the kind of terms that particular post was doing well for in the past, you can think of working on those and some other related terms in a way that will help that blog post become perfect match for those targets.
If you had written a blog post in 2011, some of points may not make sense in 2014. It’s time to replace all of them with the the points which will work in 2014 and in coming years. You'll need to spend a good amount of time researching various ways you can add more value to the outdated content.
Once you are happy with the changes, you can consider republishing it on your blog's home page.
This will result in more social shares, more comments and traffic from social networks to that post. All of these activities are going to help you gain some fresh links and social media boost to that post and which will ultimately help that post do well on search engines again.
If you feel there are some posts on your blog, which are of no use in today's market, simply delete them.
Build More Backlinks
Apart from this, look at ways to build more backlinks to your blog old blog posts. Here are some pointers which will help you build quality and targeted backlinks for your posts:
Recommended:Â ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
Do Some Guest Posts
Find top blogs in your niche and start doing guest posts on them using the old blog post you want to promote. While adding links in your guest post, don’t use the same anchor text. You can think of building some backlinks using your domain name plus keyword variation as anchor text.
Popular Posts Section
Add a Popular Posts section in your blog's sidebar or in the footer section with the aim to send more targeted traffic to your old blog posts and for internal linking purpose. Keep track of performance of the posts that you add to the Popular Posts section using Google Analytics.
Link from New Blog Posts
Apart from this, start linking to your old blog posts from new blog posts that you are publishing on your blog on daily or weekly basis.
Do Roundup Posts
Another thing you could do is roundup posts. In roundup posts, you can easily link to those posts on which you want to gain more traffic from search engines.
Let me share an example with you. I used to write about different ways to earn money from blogs on BloggersPassion. I had covered topics related to ppc, affiliate marketing, paid reviews, banner ads etc with the aim to help my blog readers earn more more money from their blogs. So my roundup post topics can be: top 10 ways 10 earn money from blog or best google adsense alternatives. In these roundup posts, I can easily link to my old blog posts.
And these round up posts seem to be ranking very high on Google and other search engines as well.
Reply to Comments using Old Blog Posts
Why not start leaving some value adding comments on targeted blogs in your niche using the blog posts of your choice. And its also a great idea to start replying to some of comments on your own blog using the blog posts you want to promote.
Get More Social Shares
If you have a strong fan base on social networks, you should start sharing some of interesting old blog posts there. You can even ask some of your blogging friends to link to or share your posts to their fan base. In exchange, you can offer them sharing of their blog contents to your fans. Explore using sites like Viral Content Bee, BizSugar or Triberr to encourage more social shares. Here's a video from Ms. Ileane that shows you How to Get More Shares from Viral Content Bee.
Results from All of My Hard Work
Now its time to share the result of all this hard work which I've done so far with getting traffic to old blog posts. By following the techniques that I shared with you above, I ended up increasing traffic to my blog coming from Google search by more than 46% with Google's Panda update which happened sometime ago. Here is the screenshot from my Google Analytics showing this data:
Above are some techniques I used to increase traffic on my old blog posts. It would be interesting and really helpful for all of us to know how you are going about improving traffic on your old blog posts from Google and other search engines. Please share your ideas and opinions in the comments section below.
Thanks for this post. I’m still getting to grips with SEO and am currently getting most clicks on my blog through social media, email subscriptions and clicks from other blogs. I know I have a lot to learn so as to get people coming through search engines! I guess I’ll check out Google analytics and also think about getting more back links. Thanks for tips!
Rachel, I hope the shared tips will help you drive more traffic to your targeted blog posts from Google and other search engines. Surey you should start using Google Analytics to keep a measure of your marketing activities.
Great post here, lots of good content that I’ll apply to my blog. I think re working posts is a key takeaway here, too many blogs post outdated content as opposed to the evergreen content that google is looking for.
Hi Anil,
Good to see you on BBT 🙂
I do agree with all your points and yes, editing the old posts by adding some valuable information will bring organic traffic to our blog. I know this already and implementing the tips as you told. But not getting time to do guest blogging, will try to do it.
Congratz for the traffic improvement. I can see your active performance these days and now you got traffic boost as a result. Thanks for sharing your experiences, will follow them to get huge traffic to my blog.
Great tips to increase blog traffic especially about the roundup tips
Hi Anil,
This is a very great tutorial i must confess, the points your raised are all very vital for traffic generation as a blogger. Thanks for sharing.
Hi, Anil,
Great info! I didn’t know some of these tips but I’m going to use them now.
Thanks.
Sue
Hello Anil,
I quite enjoyed your article: it’s a sad shame that many bloggers are crazy for updating new content and passionately disregard older content – usually, to their own detriment.
Your entry clarified that – for the good of the entire blogosphere.
However, I must point out some things:
1. When you delete older posts, it brings an issue of dead links – hence 404’s. It is my belief that your post would be more brilliant if you indicate how exactly to tackle those 404’s productively.
2. Updating older posts keeps your overall site fresh generally (not only in the eyes of search engines). If you can’t publish content daily, at least, update daily. Your Alexa and other fringe benefits of updating daily will surely accrue (as if you are a daily publisher!)
Be certain to have a very great day!
Always,
Terungwa
No doubt if we are deleting old blog posts, they have to be handled properly. Before deleting any post, we need to cross check if that particular post is linked internally or externally. There are few other healthy alternates one can try:
– Noinxed and follow the posts you want to remove from google index
– Redirect the old posts to the relevant posts on your blog.
Hi, Anil,
What a fantastic encouragement to get more traffic. This is just the kick I needed – as I do update full blog post, but don’t really promote them as you have suggested above.
I usually do link to another blog post in every new blog post that I create. When updating older ones, I need to make sure everything’s current, and then when commenting on blogs use older links instead of the newest ones.
Thanks so much for sharing this valuable information, I’ll definitely be sharing with friends…
Take care,
– Carol
hello anil bro
thanks for sharing this article here, actually My web traffic goes down after panda Update, now I think i need to pay attention on my old posts. thanks for sharing these tips to get better Page views on old Posts.
thank you in advance Anil, has been willing to share, and sharing this article, because it really helped me in bringing my website to better traffic and nice, I will apply and hopefully it works well, and I also know the need to further study on SEO, this is a great article, thanks.
Good post Anil. I agree on the points you made. Though I am not a regular blogger but I am into this SEO and digital marketing industry for quite a long time. I can tell that data gathering and data monitoring is the way to success. Writing good and informative content is an obvious requirement but analyzing the data from GA and other tools are similarly important to understand and gauge what is working and what is not.
Additionally, I would suggest bloggers to reformat and restructure their contents on various formats and publish them on different web medium so that those can get you additional traffic, ranking boost and industry recognition.
Thanks for additional tip Soumya. No doubt its a great idea to reproduce the blog contents in different formats and then distributing them on different networks so that you are able to drive more traffic, links and words about your blog and you from different web properties.
Thanks for the post. Your results do look very good. Personally, I’ve seen that on my site links from new posts and roundup posts where working best. I’ve had a list of popular posts for some time then removed it and saw no difference after introducing it or after removing it a year later. I guess it’s because visitors of my site are each interested in only a subset of the posts and 80% of the links shown in the popular posts widgets are not relevant to them. But displaying a list of related posts is very useful in this case.
Its just great, the mechanism you shared to drive high traffic from search engines to our old blogs is just awesome, I am surely going to do that 🙂
Hi Anil, sorry i’m not really know english well. My question is, you say i will know which my old post lost traffic. HOW? Do i neeed click Acquisition>keyword>organic. after that click “landing page”. Is this correct? If yes, where should i look to know that post lost traffic?
You should select a date range like last six month or last one year and then see the traffic trend for that post like how that post is doing session wise in the selected duration.
I hope you get my point. Please let me know in case you still have any doubt.
I always look at the blog comments I have received as samples of my Prospect community. After all, people take the time to write a comment because they have some input to offer. These commenters may also be interested in an ongoing e-mail blast. Congrats on your site going UP after Panda, Anil, by the way.
Nice result! I’m new at blogging, so I don’t have old post, but for sure I’ll know what to do with them in the future!
Thx!
Well best way to get traffic from old content. Little bit research then editing & interlink with new content will help.
What do you think about republishing old content by changing its date to new one. ?
It will also work.
You should do it. But make sure year, month and date are not being used as part of your URL on your blog. This is just to make sure your blog post URL does not change as you are making changes to its publishing date. I hope you get my point.
Impressive article for improving traffic to the old post, as a business owner I found an interesting information here. thanks for this post.
Anil !
It was great when i read your article. You have given the most effective method which adds fuel to my mind especially this round-up post and link form new blog post are awesome that i feel benefited. Great work and Keep contributing ! so that We will be stay updated.
i think backlinks nowadays not working to catch more traffic to blog but i m sure about quality content will surely do 🙂
Hello Anil sir,
I am new in blogging but this post is so knowledgeable for my future aspects..For analysis our old post to check google analytic was the best part of this post.
This post must be read by those blogger who are actually newbie. I will share this post on my social network that could be helpful for newbies.
Regards,
Minakshi Srivastava
Good to know Minakshi my blogging skills are able to help you and some other newbie bloggers. And thanks a lot for your intention to spreading words about this post of mine on social networks.
Hi Anil,
Awesome post. It’s time to monitor my older posts 🙂
Hi Anil,
Editing old blog posts is smart. Work with what you have, to improve it, to make it timely, and to add any knowledge or wisdom you’ve acquired since last covering the topic. My posts are only 4 months old on Blogging from Paradise – yep it’s young – but I’ll pop in here or there to add a good link, or edit some section, to boost the post’s traffic a bit.
Simply linking in to old posts works like a charm too. I like going through my blog once a week or so to link in to older posts, to boost traffic through different sources. People are willing to read what’s valuable, whether it’s from now or 5 years ago. That’s why some books and blogs become timeless classics, especially if the content is evergreen. Keep improving, keep promoting, keep tweaking and keep learning, and you’ll create some kick butt content for your audience through older blog posts.
Thanks Anil and Ileane! Tweeting from Fiji.
Ryan
Great advice here. I read this post last week, and just a couple of days ago did a top 10 FAQ post. Unfortunately, by acccident, I made it a page rather than a blog post, but still it serves a good need.
Hi Anil,
Really very useful article about how anyone can drive traffic to old posts and the two most effective ways in my mind is updating the old posts with new ideas and using internal linking back to the old post.
Thanks for sharing the tips Anil. Too many times bloggers write terrific content, only for it to be archived and forgotten about (even though the content is extremely useful and can be resurrected and polished to continue to help provide insight for visitors).
Utilizing the strategies you mentioned (especially internally linking to the posts from new fresh content) can help bloggers achieve more traffic, and enhance their offerings. Thanks again!
This is an impressive post for generating traffic to old blog post, as a blogger I must say I have some interesting information herein. It is just great, the tips you shared here will surely help every blogger. Certainly I am going to apply these tips.
These are great tips on how to utilize our older blog posts. I love the idea of sharing this content through guest posting and updating the article with more valued content. Great ideas. Thanks for sharing. Nice to see you here.
Irish Carter
Excellent points Anil, I think it is always worth revisiting some of your older posts, especially where the content is still very relevant.
Thanks for the post!!! I have done social sharing for my blog and it helped in increasing traffic to my blog. Also linking to previous blogs in comments has helped. Hereafter, I will write round up posts for my blog.
Thanks for the information. This is very easy to understand and practical for me. Cheers. am going to dig up older post to put it into use 🙂
I have been out of the game for a while and let a few of my websites die, so need to ramp the seo again.
One comment though, when I used to try and get guest posters to write for the site the majority was poor quality with lots of spammmy links. Are there any websites where budding writers can be contacted to write on certain subjects just for exposure?
Thank you for the useful tips. I will try them for sure.
Great Tips and an important topic for any blogger to know. But I have a doubt regarding refreshing old posts. With republishing you mean making a new post and publishing or just making few changes in the old post and using Update option?
Hello Anil,
This article really an eye opener for me as I haven’t looking back my old posts. I agree with the points like commenting and adding valuable information to old post will drive a traffic. But I am afraid to delete some of older which are no use in current age as these posts were already crawled by google bots and these posts were already shared in many social communities. Deleting urls from Webmaster may workout but still I doubt that it would be great technique. Rather we can few lines at the start of article to intimate readers about out of date posts.
Hi Anil,
Nice detailed posts and well presented. I like the idea of going back to old posts and give them some fresh up; but this must not go without saying, sometimes is just a good idea to better move on and let go the past.
I changed the design of my blog look this past week and was forced to revisit older posts, I came across some posts that was not doing good again in SERP and some, that the information were out of date.
Oh! It is a very hectic work fixing than writing new ones, I must confess.
Thanks for sharing and do have a nice day.
Old blog posts are the base of any website. The exact way what you said to improve traffic I tried with my blog. Seen a dramatic change. Thank you .
Keep posting good articles.
Linking your old post with newer posts is a good way to improve your site’s internal links.
Hi Anil,
Thanks for the info !!!. Yes you are right, As days goes on your old post will loose value to the current trend and rework is required to change according to current trend.
Thanks
Siva
Well very nice information you have shared.
Tell me is it possible if we edit the date of our older post to get the more traffic.
As i have applied that formula on my 1 very popular post but same visitors still now coming may be result came after long time.
Hi Anil,
Really valuable information you shared here because many bloggers facing this issue of decrements in old blog posts.
I completely agree with your point i.e. rework or renovation of old blog posts which very effective to attract people towards your post. Because I used this technique in my blog and its applicable.
Once again thanks for sharing this info and have a nice day…..!!!
Thank you, this was very helpful… although sometimes I think I am learning so much my brain is going to explode! I’ve saved this for future reading to come back to again.