Increase Your Website's Traffic By Updating Your Existing Contents: Giving Them A New Life And Chance

There are many ways to increase your web traffic, and the most common are: building appropriate backlinks, increasing your site's authority and adding new contents frequently. While those could increase your traffic to a margin, there are other ways to increase traffic without doing any of those.

And one of them is by leveraging what you already had.

To extending the reach of your existing contents, you're felling the gaps where you have previously lacked.

Website owners and webmasters have gone to great lengths to increase their web traffic. From doing extensive SEO strategies to boost organic search traffic, sending marketing emails, doing social media marketing methods, to purchasing ads. But sometimes we forget that traffic is not just coming from new contents - our old contents have their own potentials that may have been sleeping for all this time.

If you can revive that potential, your old contents can have a better chance in attracting visitors. Or even better than your new ones if that old content has massive potentials.

Below is some of the ways you can do to leverage your existing contents and making them fresh again.

Fresh content

Identify Existing Contents

First of all, not all of your existing contents will perform as good as intended after you've updated them. There are contents which were doing well and still are, and these contents should better be left alone. But other contents that see an ever-decreasing traffic and age as time passes, are the ones to be updated.

So your focus should be one those that aren't performing as good as they were, and those that aren't ranking well as they are supposed to.

After you know which your existing contents should be updated, you need to get a close look at their keywords. You may have targeted certain keywords on those contents, but your previous keywords strategy may or may not work when those contents are put on the web. In order to correct them, you must first identify what keywords on those posts are currently ranking, and on what position are they.

You can use your favorite online tools for SEO to help you compile your list.

After the list is made, take a look at the top keywords. Here, you'll see the evidence on how you have or haven't succeed in your previous keywords strategy.

Not that you old contents are bad, but as time passes, things may have changed. This particular reason is one of the cause why your old posts weren't ranking well anymore. After you have the evidence with you, you need to take a look on what have changed since that content was first posted.

Here you need to identify your competitors and see what you're up against. By seeing how your competitors are doing, and their similar posts, you'll know the potential of improvement. If you see your competitors' posts are driving more traffic, there should be a reason why they've succeeded and why you didn't.

Choose and select a new potential "main' keywords if you see that your existing ones weren't performing well. Conduct some keyword research to find out whether the new keywords are better, and to know if there are any other better keywords to target.

Identify Your Competitors

In the fast-paced internet, one genuine article will soon have too many similar posts covering the same subject written by others. This is inevitable. What you need to do here is to keep improvising so your old contents will remain "fresh".

Because you're not going to create any new contents, and the aim is to leverage your older contents, you must first know how your competitors are doing

So before doing any updates on your existing content, you need to see which of your contents need a refresh, and which can be considered timeless.

Do a quick search with search engines to see contents posted by competitors that are similar to yours. If you're not ranking on the top of the search engines' spot, the chances are contents created by competitors are doing better than yours.

To identify your competitors and identify their contents, visit all of the pages listed on the first page of search engines. In each of your competitors' page you're visiting, you need to make a judgement call on which of their content parts are better than yours. Then do the comparison.

"Is your content worse? Do you have enough details to cover the subject? What questions are remained unanswered? Which of the targeted keywords queries you left uncovered? Do you need images, or do you need to add more or replace the existing? Do you need to add video to the post?

In short, you need to know the things you can do in order to make your content better than your competitors. You need to review each and every competitors on the first page of search engines to ensure that there are no gaps open.

Read more: Get More Traffic To Your Website By Spying Your Competitors

Update Your Content Based On User Search Query

After you know who are you up against and to which contents of theirs you need to be better, now it's the time to update your old content by breathing it a new life.

Whatever you do to update your content, the goal is to make it better than the competition. It needs to be fully able to answer people's search query and their intention in visiting your website in the first place. In short, you need to make the best content out there.

But again, before you do any update to your existing content, you must first finished analyzing your competitors' contents so you have a clear idea of what your contents were missing.

To update your content, never rewrite it completely. Search engines have indexed your page, and new (massive) change may affect your ranking. Old contents of yours may have a better chance in competing if compared to your new ones because they may have backlinks. And by having more time being on the web, your old posts should be seen by others already.

And for the very least, never change the URL of the old post. If you must, consider a 301 redirect so people will be seeing the new post rather than an error page. But again, a change in URL may affect your ranking.

If you're doing this well, search engines will reward you for your efforts. Search engines love new contents, and they adore updates because they hunger for new information. If you can give more benefit to your web visitors in overall, search engines will like you no matter what.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Keywords no matter how people see it, they will be one of the main criteria for search engines to put you on their list. Keywords still rule, and there is no reason why you shouldn't keep your eyes on them on your newly updated old contents.

As search engines mature, it's obvious that ranking signals have changed and of course, increased. But your contents' keywords which you are targeting and ranking for, should be well chosen (if not yet before), and should be included in the headings and subheadings. Never make them look and feel spammy because both search engines and visitors will dislike it.

Adding more keywords to the existing targeted keywords is always a great strategy. To make your newly updated old content feel good to read and not spammy because of the increasing targeted keywords, you need to make a lengthier and more in-depth update. The more information you add on your old content will enable you to include more organic keywords than before.

Your newly updated contents should be well-optimized to any targeted keywords. If you add any new keywords to the existing, you need to make sure that your update also represent those keywords.

Engagement As Priority

When you have updated your old content, the content should now feel better and "new". Without you even bother to create new compelling post, your old post should be as powerful as it was when it was first posted, or even better.

With put all that new power to the ground, you need to leverage engagement.

If your website's design should remain untouched, you need to make some little changes so your newly updated old content will stand out more. There are many ways to do this.

  • Lengthier content to keep user reading.
  • Embedded media and attractive visuals to keep your users occupied and spend more time on your content.
  • More internal links pointing to your updated content so visitors and search engines will have a higher chance to visit it more often.
  • Other contents whenever possible, should reflect the newly updated content to encourage exploration and increasing the time visitors will spend on your site.

Remarket, Reshare

Your content may be a few days old, months or even years. As time passes, your old contents before being updated, may receive an ever-decreasing traffic. But as you now have updated them, you need to give them a new representation out there.

Remarket them by resharing them. Use social media networks to spread the words as if your content is brand new. Write compelling title to encourage and increase clickthrough rates. In short, you need to get more people to your contents by giving them an extra boost.

In case that you can't wait for search engines to notice the change of your old contents, you may want to tell them to re-index them. In Google, you need visit the Webmasters Tools to "fetch" them as Google. But if you're also doing extensive social media remarketing, or doing manual update on your feeds and XML, search engines should recrawl your newly updated old contents more quickly.

Keyboard

Conclusion

When creating new contents, marketing them and creating backlinks for them aren't yet sufficient, you should never forget that your older posts do have the potential to give you traffic. And there is always a possibility that your older contents have a better chance to attract traffic than any of your newer ones.

Leveraging the visibility of your old contents by updating them is a strategy in which you just have to "perfect" what you have without even bothering to create some new ones and betting on them. But there are times that this strategy may not work as intended.

Like for example when a particular existing content is already having a good rank and great traffic. Any changes to it may affect its performance. While your expectation is to make it better, you should be aware that an update on that high-performing content will alter its potentials: it can either increase or decrease. So update wisely; the choice is yours.

Related: Give Your Old and Outdated Content A Second Chance