In this blog, Aaron Carpenter, Senior Editor at Huble Digital, explains why B2B companies should update and optimise their old blog content to increase website traffic and maximise lead generation.
When it comes to increasing your website’s organic traffic, creating high-quality blogs is by far the easiest and most cost-effective method. But it’s not easy.
While most B2B companies understand the importance of blogging, very few have a content strategy in place to drive it. Those that do might only blog once or twice a month, promote the blogs for a week or two and then forget about them.
Very few B2B companies think about how to get more value out of their old blog content long term. But for those that do, content marketing isn’t just about creating, publishing and promoting content, but also about updating and optimising that content over time.
In truth, there are three scenarios when you should update your old blog content:
- When you have a blog that isn’t receiving any organic traffic
You’ve built it out, optimised it and promoted it but it’s not being ranked or found. It could be that the keyword you have optimised the blog for has little to no search volume, so you might want to optimise it for a different keyword.
- When you have a blog that gets a small amount of organic traffic
OK, the blog is being found – but not that often.
Maybe the keywords you are targeting have small search volumes or you haven’t promoted the blog properly. Another possibility is that the blog is ranking on the second or third page of Google and, let’s face it, no one goes there.
- When you have a blog that gets lots of organic traffic
Great – your blog is getting loads of organic traffic – but should you stop there? No, of course not! To stay ahead of the competition and ensure your blog continues to perform, you need to update it on a regular basis to include the latest and most relevant information.
Now that you know when you should be updating your old blog content – why should you be doing it?
In this blog, I’m going to share with you six reasons why you should update your old blogs – and how doing so can turn those blogs into traffic and lead-generators for your business.
1. Google loves fresh content
Let’s face it, Google is the only search engine in the game that you should care about if you’re based in Europe, so it makes sense to create your content for Google.
And if you’re looking to win Google over – you need to be creating what’s called ‘fresh content’.
Google loves fresh content. In 2010, it released its ‘Freshness’ update. This update focuses on providing searchers with ‘fresher, more recent search results’.
In other words, relevant, up-to-date content.
At its core, fresh content is:
- Up to date
- Informative
- Relevant to the searcher’s query
- A hot or recent topic
If you keep the four points above in mind when brainstorming and creating content, you should be able to attract more website visitors and increase rankings on search engine results pages.
2. Keep information up to date
Outdated content can be very off-putting. Trends and strategies change every day, week and month, so if your blogs contain outdated information and advice, they may very quickly seem outdated and old to your website visitors.
Take SEO, for example. There are algorithm updates almost every week. If you have a blog about SEO best practices and haven’t updated it in years, how on earth will visitors benefit from the information?
So make sure you check out your old blogs now and again. If you see a new development online or know that content could be improved to bring it in line with best practice, update it!
3. Drive more traffic to your pages
If your old blogs are under-performing, you can drive more organic traffic to them by updating them and including new information.
These blogs might be under-performing because the information is outdated, or a competitor’s blog is more comprehensive. They might be under-performing because you didn’t optimise them properly way back when.
Either way, use this as an opportunity to make them better. Have a look at what your competitors are doing. Think about what your blogs need to include to better serve readers. Try to come up with a unique angle that no one else has done before.
You can also identify new keywords to incorporate into your blogs and write about. You might find that your blogs are being found by people using keywords you didn’t originally optimise them for.
So if a blog you posted last year still receives a small amount of organic traffic – it means people are still interested in the topic that blog covers. By updating and improving that blog, you can take increase that traffic gradually and use keyword terms relevant to the topic to attract new visitors.
Remember: Google crawls web pages regularly, so if it sees that your blogs have been updated and include more relevant information, relevant keywords and internal links, it will start to serve those blogs to people searching for terms around it.
Need a real-world example of how this works in practice? Check out our case study and see how we increased organic traffic to our website by updating old blogs.
4. Improve search engine rankings
As a side effect of updating your blogs to include new, relevant and valuable information, you’ll generate more organic traffic to those blogs and Google will – over time – increase the ranking of each blog in search.
It’s not an instantaneous process. It could – depending on the level of competition – be months before your blogs take a top position (anywhere from 1st to 5th) on a Google search engine results page.
That said, if you have updated your content properly, included valuable information and targeted the right keyword terms, it’s just a matter of time before it starts ranking well.
For a further boost, I would suggest you interlink your old blogs (where relevant) so that any SEO value attributed to one is shared with the other linked blogs. It’s a great way to structure your content.
5. Turn your best performers into something more
One of the great things about publishing content on the internet is that you can always go back and edit it to be better.
As a marketer, you should always be thinking about what you can do to better help your prospects and existing customers.
And that means producing better quality content.
Even if you have a blog that generates loads of organic traffic and leads for your business, think about what else you could add or what you could change to make it even better.
You can...
- Include another call-to-action in the blog to drive conversions
- Set up a lead flow to push readers to other downloadable content
- Include a video - or diagrams and images - to better explain your points
- Include more information
There’s loads you can do. Just take a moment to think about it. All of this can make content on your website generate more leads.
(If you’re unsure of how content aids your website’s lead generation, check out this blog for an in-depth explanation)
6. Establish authority across multiple topics
If you have been producing blogs for a while, chances are that when you started your content strategy was all over the place with no underlying strategy. You probably produced blogs in a bid to ride the coattails of a market trend or targeted high competition keyword terms.
Luckily, you can go back to those blogs and unify them under specific topics to create a holistic content strategy and update them to be in line with the pain points your prospects are experiencing.
Take a look at the content you have produced already and see how it can be updated to better address the pain points of your prospects and linked to other blogs.
You might have to revamp the blog entirely, changing bits of information, so that it fits with a specific topic area.
The benefit of doing all this is that over time you will establish your business as an authority in one or multiple topic areas.
Not bad, right? There’s more to the methodology (it’s called a topic cluster approach), so you can learn more about it here.
Updating content is a quick win that will enable you to drive more organic traffic to your website and generate more quality leads.
As you update and optimise your old content, ensure that you link it to other relevant content assets on your website (blogs, eBooks, case studies, videos, webinars) so that it can be found by interested parties and become part of your wider marketing activity.
Content is king – that much is for sure – so don’t neglect the content you have created thus far!
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