How to Upgrade your Old Blog Posts That Have Little Traffic
Quick answer: Instead of deleting low-traffic posts, which can reduce traffic, review your analytics first since some pages have strong backlinks or engagement. Then keep posts up to date, rewrite strong performers with more depth, A/B test title tags on weaker ones, research better keywords, check backlinks and add internal links from related well-performing posts.
A typical upgrade “strategy” is where you just take old content and delete it. Most people who do it, do it wrong and your traffic goes down, instead of going up. If you are not technically savvy or you don’t really know how to interpret your traffic data, you can mess up your content strategy.
Even though a webpage doesn’t get many visitors, some of them may have several strong backlinks and social shares. They are creating some good brand signals and amazing user metrics for you. A good example is a blog post that doesn’t get much traffic, but your readers stick around for 5 minutes or more and it makes your overall website do better.
So if you are not getting enough traffic to your blog posts, what should you do?
Look at your data on Google Analytics and list down top 20 blog articles and see if there is anything new in the last 60 days. If there is something new has popped up, take a look at the blog posts and see how many keywords that page ranks for. If it ranks for a hundred keywords, then it’s good. For pages that have high keyword ranking, it means more search traffic, more people finding it, more links coming to the site and it means higher link equity.
These are a few things that you can do:
- Go thru all your blog posts and keep it up to date. Doesn’t mean making the blog post better, doubling or tripling the length. but more so like tweaking it if it’s out of date.
- Upgrade your content – Look at those that are doing really well and rewrite them with a little more depth. For those that are not doing so well, do an A/B testing on the title tags to see if you can get more search traffic.
- Keyword research – Look for what keywords the blog post is ranking for. Find out if there are any better keywords that you can use that can get more traffic.
- Backlinks – Check how many backlinks some of those posts have. To build backlinks will be hard work for most people. Next, see if you have internal links for those posts. If you don’t, then look for other related blog posts that do well and add links to them and over time, you will see that they will start to rank better. This is how you add internal links to an old blog post.
- Comments – You should always be on top of your game when it comes to readers’ comments. Be timely when replying to comments. Take their comments seriously like someone speaking to you and it’s just rude that you don’t reply. If you make a mistake on your blog posts, then apologize and ensure that you’ll fix it.
- How do you improve and fix it? – Look for the keywords that you are trying to rank for, and search for all the articles that have similar keywords that ranked in the top 10 and see the difference of their articles and yours are. And spot some of the things that the ranked articles have in common that you don’t. Take those concepts and integrate into your own blog posts.
So that’s it, upgrade your blog posts and see the traffic increased!
References:
- Image Credit : https://unsplash.com/photos/S0hFspmvm_s
Key takeaways
- Check analytics before deleting any low-traffic post.
- Refresh outdated content and deepen top performers.
- Research keywords and test title tags.
- Add internal links from related, strong posts.
Frequently asked questions
Should you delete old blog posts with low traffic?
Not automatically. The article warns that deleting content can lower traffic, as some low-traffic pages still have valuable backlinks, social shares or strong engagement. The full article explains this point in more detail as part of its wider guidance on update old blog posts.
How do internal links help old blog posts?
Linking to older posts from related, well-performing articles passes authority and helps search engines find them, so they can rank better over time. The full article explains this point in more detail as part of its wider guidance on update old blog posts.
What is title tag A/B testing?
It means trying different title tags on a page and comparing results to see which attracts more search traffic, useful for posts that are underperforming. The full article explains this point in more detail as part of its wider guidance on update old blog posts.
How can 90 Degrees Asia help with content and SEO?
90 Degrees Asia is a Singapore-based B2B digital marketing agency that supports companies across APAC with LinkedIn marketing, content and lead generation. Its team can help plan and run content and SEO programmes suited to regional markets. You can start a conversation via the contact page.
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