How To Get Old Content Ranking Better
Do you ever look at a piece of My Amend content and feel a sad swell of nostalgia? It did so well back then when it was first published. Maybe it even hit viral status. But the ravages of time did their dirty work, and before you know it, the traffic has dropped to nothing. The online community has moved on to the next big thing, leaving your content lonely and gathering digital dust.
How to Revive Old Content
Re-Packaging For New Content
The usual recommendation is to re-package old content and create something new. For the record, I am 100% in favor of doing this. It is a great way to extend your ideas and get the most out of every piece you publish.
Re-packaging your content includes:
- Creating more blog posts from the original idea to expand on that idea.
- Making slideshows that give the basic points.
- Creating comics about the concept.
- Making infographics
- Recording videos
- Recording podcasts
- Any other way of making new media from the old
But however great this method is, it cannot be applied to all old content. Often, it makes more sense to get old content ranked high rather than using it to create new content.
4 Ways To Make Old Content New Again
This isn’t a complete list, but I have found these methods easier and more fruitful.
1. Check Longer Keyword Phrases
So maybe your content struggles to rank for whatever keywords you optimized it for. It’s time to find easier keywords! Find phrases that target the long-form search queries. They usually have lower competition and are easier to get higher in search results. Serpstat has a very cool feature letting you discover various alternatives to your current term called “Cluster Research.” It shows the list of closely related words based on how similar their Google search results are. The more identical URLs rank for the provided phrases, the closer they are related. It’s a great way to discover alternative terms to optimize your content struggling to rank.
2. Add Links to Older Content
Internal links are not to be ignored. Whenever you write a new article for your blog, use every opportunity to link back to your old content where you discussed a related issue or explained a mentioned concept.
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That is a good little way to bring attention to old posts and send readers on a journey down the rabbit hole of your blog. A strip of suggested bars on the bottom of each page is a good way to do that. However, in-content links have been found to work better for click-through.
An internal link-building plugin can increase the number of in-content internal links to any articles you pick. Specify the words you want to be linked to and the URLs to link to, and the internal links will be added automatically. This is a great way to push your old content to rank higher.
3. Buff Up Your Content For Better Content Value
I had a piece of content that did extremely well and kept getting regular traffic more than two years after it was published. It was one of my better Evergreen, pieces if I say so myself. But then all traffic started declining gradually. This is a good sign that your content needs an update. Longer content mentioning related concepts and entities seems easier to rank these days. Some SEO checklists will recommend content longer than 500 words. Here’s a quick guide that recommends a range of at least 300 words. I suggest focusing on creating in-depth content instead of counting the words. So I went back to that piece, added more to buff it up with some valuable content, and guess what? Gradually, it started ranking again, and my traffic returned.