Are you struggling from a writer’s block? IS business booming and suddenly you’ve realised you have no time to blog?
These are common concerns, and despite the huge SEO benefits of blog creation, a lot of us simply don’t have the time to write new content.
However, have you written a bunch of content in the past? If so – huge opportunities to gain easy SEO traffic could be found in your existing content.
Below we’ve outlined 4 steps to using your existing content, and how to optimise this content for the best possible results.
Identify which blog content brings in traffic
Using Google Analytics, you can identify which of your blogs are driving SEO traffic to your site. Simply go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages And then filter by organic traffic, select your time frames (usually just select a year) and type the URL string into the search bar. E.g. if your blog url is just /blog, type this. This will then filter your results for just the pages with /blog in the URL.
You can then see what content are the top performers. This is always the first step we do with clients to identify opportunities as it gives you a good idea of already-active pages, and then you can go through them to identify opportunities to update them.
E.g. is the content relevant still? Is the structure not really great? Is the content quite thin?
Look at the content & explore if there’s an opportunity to optimise it.
Review pages with keywords on the second page
By using a tool like SEMrush, either you or your SEO agency can filter results for your domain’s keyword rankings to show keywords on the second page (between 9 and 18 we ideally recommend).
The SEMrush report will then provide you with a whole list of keywords you rank on the 2nd page of Google with.
You want to then analyse the search volume & competition level of each keyword. Also, look at your ranks for that keyword already.
These keywords on the second page we call “low hanging fruit” – huge opportunities if you’re so close to the first page. If you find URLs that are blog posts, ranking for keywords with a strong search volume on the second page, these posts are then worth re-doing and optimising.
We did this for one of our fashion eCommerce clients and found 15 blog posts that were not optimised that well for SEO performance but all between positions 10 and 15 on the second page for their high-value keywords… it’s a gold mine and dramatically increased SEO traffic on their own when optimised!
How to optimise a blog post for SEO
Now, you’ve figured out which posts you can optimise and are close to the first page of Google with. The hard part now is actually knowing how to optimise this to achieve maximum results.
There are many ways you can do this, including:
- Updating to be more relevant if it’s a very old post
- Improving the structure so it follows SEO best practice guidelines
- Adding more internal links
Make sure you keep the article on the same URL and ideally don’t change the URL. If you really have to, make sure to immediately 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
Furthermore, we usually don’t recommend re-writing the entire article and removing all the existing content just in case you might do the opposite to improve your rankings. Always just add or restructure where possible.
If you have any questions about best practice for SEO when writing online feel free to reach out to us for some free advice.
How to track the performance of your optimised blog post
Now the post is live you’ll be eager to know if your work is having any impact on rankings & traffic.
You can monitor your keyword rankings using a paid-for tool like SEMrush or using your Google Search Console account.
In SEMrush you can go to keyword analytics > positions to then get an understanding of any increases or decreases in keywords over a 30 day period. On that note, yes, we recommend you wait 30 days if you can before you keep analysing…
In Google Search Console take note of your impressions & clicks graph in the “Performance” tab. If your impressions go up, it’s likely your rankings have increased. Scroll down and you should be able to see what keywords have played a part in this, unless Google hides them (known as not provided) which is where SEMrush would be useful. You should see as your impressions graph goes up, so do your clicks.
You can monitor traffic using Google Analytics. Keep an eye on your organic traffic, as this is primarily what you’re most concerned about. If your organic traffic has seen an increase, you can then try and track what pages were bringing in traffic & cross reference this with your keyword analysis using SEMrush & Google Search Console.
If you’re looking to take your content to the next level and want strong SEO results, reach out to us today for a free consultation of your site.
Alternatively, read more about how to optimise your product descriptions once you’re done optimising your blog content!