How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

HubSpot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog

Current Articles | RSS Feed

How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

digg it |

reddit |

del.icio.us |

StumbleUpon

One of the many great benefits of blogging is the traffic from search engines that you get to each and every article for keywords related to that specific article (if you blog is set up correctly). The traffic for each keyword or for each article is usually small - though once in a while you usually hit it big. But when you add up the traffic for dozens, or over time, hundreds of blog articles, it can really add up.

One example of this is an article I wrote 6 months ago in June 2007 about "Free Google Advertising". Even as recently as a couple weeks ago, we were still getting some traffic to this article because it ranked on the first page of Google for terms like "free advertising on Google", and a lot of people search for terms like that.

But, recently I noticed the traffic for these keywords had died off. (Oh no!) I checked our rank for the keywords and sure enough, or rank had declined so we were no longer on the first page. As we all should know by now: No first page = No traffic. I could have just accepted it and moved on and written some new articles. But I didn't. With a few quick changes to the article, I was able to climb back up in the rankings and start to get some of the traffic back in just a couple days.

Here is a HubSpot graph showing our rank for one of the relevant keywords. Notice how we were on the first page for a long time, then fell off, and then moved back up.

How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

Here are the steps I took to climb back up in the rankings for this blog article and get my traffic back.

Research the keywords that were driving traffic before. Knowing what the most important word or phrases were that had been driving traffic to your article before is important, since you know you have a very good shot at ranking for those terms again.
Analyze the key on-page SEO characteristics of the article. The most important field is the title of the article (which should also be the page title and the page URL if your blog is configured properly). You should also look at any headings within the article and the text of the article itself. For instance, I noticed that I had not used the word "advertising" or "advertisement" very much (only a couple times).
Rewrite the article title. My old title "Free Advertising on Google: A How To Guide" was good at getting people interested in reading the article. It was not as good for search engines. I made it shorter and more focused on my keywords. The title is now "Free Advertising on Google". Because my blog is set up correctly, this text also automatically appears in the page title and the URL, so they are more focused as well. Cool.
Rewrite or add headings. Search engines look at text in headings as more important than other text on the page. So, if you don't have any headings, add them. If you do have them, make sure they focus on your keywords. I re-wrote one of my headings to be "How to Get Free Advertising on Google" and added two others with keywords.
Edit the article text. Tweak the article content a bit to try and incorporate the keywords for which you had been ranking into the article content a bit more. I don't believe in measuring keyword density like some people - I think the text needs to be well written not mechanical, but you can probably add the right keywords into the article 3-5 more times without much trouble.
Write a new blog article that links to the old one. A new blog article that has a well placed link to the old one using anchor text that includes your keywords can help a little bit, since it is an additional link and references the relevant keywords in the link text. For example, at the top of this article, I linked to the old article.
Track your rank for the next couple days / weeks. Depending on the authority of your website with Google and how often they index your website, you can see changes in a couple days (like me) or it might take longer.

One of the more advanced things I did not do, but could have done, is to analyze all of the links into the blog article and see if I could optimize the anchor text of any of those links to be more focused on the right keywords. Maybe if I get bored this weekend I'll do that too.

Posted by Mike Volpe on Mon, Jan 14, 2008 @ 11:44 AM

COMMENTS

In Islamic belief there are 3 types of beings:
-Humans (pretty obvious)
-Angels
-Jinn
Jinns are created from smokeless fire and are similar to what most people call 'spirits'. There are good jinns and bad jinns (just like humans) and they usually don't bother humans (but we attribute all paranormal phenomena to them) They can shift shape, fly, travel great distances, and do all sorts of things we all wish we could do.
I'm more impressed with every post I read of yours. You're a true marketing 'Jinn' (that's a compliment!) and I'm grateful for the content you post. Maybe someday I'll be doing cool tricks like you.
Raza Imam
http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com

posted on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 2:01 PM by Raza Imam

Brilliant. I am off to revamp some of my older more popular posts. How do you feel about rewriting and reposting?

posted on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 5:53 PM by mhairi Petrovic

Rewriting and reposting is ok... but I am not a big fan. I would prefer to do a different version or updated opinion on an old article.

posted on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 7:00 PM by

Raza - Thank you. I am sure that I have never received a compliment like this!
Also, for the record, we do have some overseas development done at HubSpot, but the folks abroad are really part of the team - we interact with them daily and the only difference between the folks here and there is the actual address.

posted on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 7:04 PM by

Mike,
That's exactly the type of offshore development that I advocate. Outsourcing can not be transactional... the offshore team has to be a part of your team. That way they actually understand you and are committed to you. Big companies set up captive development centers that serve the same purpose. Startups can't do that, so the trick is to find a mature and reliable team that will become a part of you. I'm sure you don't have the same complaints about your offshore team as others do. In fact, I'm going to blog about your comment as the ideal way to structure an offshore relationship.
Outsourcing is about high value, not low cost. The real benefit is nurturing a team that's an extension of you.
Keep cranking out killer content dude.
Raza Imam
http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com

posted on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 4:08 PM by Raza Imam

Thanks for the great info. I've been trying to do this with some old posts, but now I see I've been going about it all wrong.

posted on Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 2:42 PM by CatherineL

Has anyone here used Artemis Pro for article submissions? I have read both good and bad reviews of it.
From what I gather, you write three different versions of your article with the same number of paragraphs and each paragraph has the same meaning and is in the same order in each version.
The software then can create multiple unique articles. One review I read stated that a six paragraph article would generate over 1,000 unique articles.
Sounds interesting if it works and would seem to be a fairly easy way to re-vitalize a previous blog article.