I’m going to give you a 5-step process you can use to boost organic traffic to your website.
This works great if your blog is at least six months old, and the older your blog is the better this works.
But if you have a brand new blog or one that is less than six months old then I probably wouldn’t bother with this, but otherwise it’s definitely going to help you get more traffic.
This is something that I first learned from Glen from ViperChill, and in the last couple of days Darren from ProBlogger has also spoken about this strategy.
Darren says that 92% of his traffic goes to his the archive pages on his blog.
It’s really important to understand where traffic is going, because if 92% of his traffic is going to the older pages on his blog, that means that 92% of that blogs income also comes from those pages.
So for that reason he is now encouraging people to update their archives just like Glen did a few years ago.
If they’re both seeing the same results then we should listen.
What they are both encouraging bloggers to do is to go through their archives and update the older post.
And what happens? When we update the old pages on our blog, Google loves it.
And that increases your chance of getting a higher rank in the search engine result pages.
I’m going to give you a 5-step process that you can use to update your archives as a checklist.
Table of Contents:
Fix Errors
The first one is to fix any errors so grammatical errors and broken links.
Make the content relevant for today.
You might have written that article two or three years ago, and some of the content might be out of date.
So make sure that the information still matters today and it still speaks to people in current terms.
Flesh it out
And then the second thing that I’m going to tell you to do is to flesh it out.
Add more detail to your older blog posts.
So add quotes, and use the comments section as a resource.
Answer questions from the comments, or throw in more info and ideas from there.
Basically, make your older blog post a more substantial and valuable piece of content.
Make it More Visual
Then the third thing that I’d like you to do is to make it more visual.
Improve the images, add diagrams, and if you’re not using images then certainly add one at least one big image at the top of the article.
Optimize
And then the fourth thing that I’d like you to do is to optimize.
Optimize your content in a couple of different ways.
The first way is for search engines, so make sure your on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is up to date.
SEO changes over time, so make sure it’s still working.
Also, focus on conversion optimization and social sharing optimization.
When you optimise for conversions make sure that your call to actions are still relevant, and that they still work.
Maybe now is a great time to add lead magnets if you’re using them.
And make sure that people can subscribe to your email list or whatever easily see your main call to action.
Schedule Maintenance
Then the fifth one is to schedule ongoing maintenance for your archives.
What I would do is; every day that you’re not blogging could be a maintenance day.
So you could go through an article on those set days, every week.
To sum up; fix errors, then flesh out your blog posts and make them absolutely the best they can be.
If you do this then you will increase the amount of organic traffic to your website because Google loves these kind of updates.
And generally speaking, they will increase the search engine rank of that piece of content.
I’m going to leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who might benefit too.