How to update old content. Ways to Increase Traffic with Old Articles
Blogs are available from large agencies and on the websites of commercial companies. They are used both as a platform for communication, and as a means of informing potential customers, and as a way to promote goods and services. Surely among all the information presented on the blog, there are leading posts that account for the maximum number of visitors and views. But time passes, the information becomes outdated, the post “gets old” and the traffic drops. Is it possible to somehow revive it in order to return attendance or even increase it? Yes, you can always make an old post up to date again.
Three ways to update content
Here's how you can increase traffic to posts that have long been posted online and have found their fans:
Remove post date. This approach can provide a traffic increase of 5-10%. But nothing may change: it all depends on the topic of the post and the relevance of the information contained in it.
Replacing the date with "fresh". In any area of business, change is constant. If you are sure that last year's post contains important and still useful information, change the publication date. The “novelty effect” will work for visitors: information with an up-to-date date is perceived as new and working “right now”. Even if you do not “PR” the article again, then in the first month traffic can grow by 50-60% - mainly due to new users who are looking for information on the topic.
Changing the post itself. In this case, they do not just change the date, but work with the information. They update it, add new cases, create new graphics, use fresh facts. Then the updated article is re-promoted in social networks by distributing links. Studies of major Western marketing companies report that in this case, a twofold increase in traffic may occur.
All these methods will work only if they are used for the actual post - the one that has already brought visitors. Deadlines are also important: do not try to update the content if the post is less than 2 months old. In this case, changing the date does nothing to help the article "get ahead." But with old content (even if it is more than a year old) everything works fine. In addition, Google encourages work on updating old posts, even if the texts of them are not edited, but simply the dates are changed.
How to select posts for updates?
Every blog has a content plan. There are also statistics that allow you to track which posts are most popular and bring customers. If you haven't collected such statistics yet, do it and be surprised how popular old articles are. They typically generate over 60% of monthly page views and around 80-90% of new leads. Of course, this does not mean that the work on the blog can be stopped, but it does mean that it is time to make the old content relevant (and, as a result, even more profitable).
It is important that updating not only increases the performance of popular posts, but also increases the conversion of those articles that were not previously noticed by users. You can select content for “reconstruction” in accordance with current trends in your business.
If you want to get the best result from such an update, follow the proven algorithm:
Select old posts to update with topics that will help with user tasks "here and now".
Collect new article keys.
Change the structure of the text and the text itself in accordance with the collected keys.
Replace the post date and post the updated content as new.
Offer new posts to your potential visitors through the mailing list or social networks.
Now you need to give search robots time to change their position in the search results. After such an update, the resource traffic increases, the post conversion improves and user interest grows. The growth figures are impressive - from 100 to 200%. That is, you can safely include work with old publications in the content plan and update the information regularly.
What else can be done?
Do not forget that all of the above are recommendations and numbers from successful cases. To understand what works in your case, conduct an experiment. After all, it takes no more than 15 minutes to change dates, and the result can be fantastic!
If you want to work on old popular content and make it more useful for users now, go the other way.
Firstly, you can make a series of publications on the topic of an old article, expanding it, supplementing it and considering the issue from different angles.
Secondly, you can completely rewrite the article, armed with up-to-date information and fresh screenshots. In this case, only the url remains from the old publication, which is re-promoted in the mailing list and social networks.
Thirdly, you can redirect the old post to the new one to redirect traffic to the new page.
Working with old posts is always justified. And not because it's an easy way to get new visitors. But also because hundreds of new posts appear on the sites every day, but the information need of users is not growing. That is, it is easier for a new visitor to offer content that has already been in demand by others, rather than to force him to read a completely new article that has not yet been rated by other users.
As for authorship and other organizational issues when updating content, each blog decides this individually, in accordance with its own editorial policy.