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 You'll need to spend a good amount of time researching various ways you can add more value to the outdated content.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:
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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.