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Content Marketing

9 Ways To Increase Blog Traffic By Updating Your Content

May 14, 2019

Believe it or not, your old posts can be the answer to your blog's traffic. If you know how to bring them back to life, you’ll be expecting a significant boost in your blog’s number of daily visitors real soon.

The problem, however, is that the process can be overwhelming, particularly for someone who doesn’t have extensive knowledge about it. So, as a way to help you get started on the right track, here are nine simple yet really effective ways to increase your blog traffic using your old content.

1. Expand Your Content

When updating your content, it's not enough that you make it longer. Adding chunks of paragraphs won’t make you instantly impressive to Google and other search engines. What you need to do is add more value to your content and make it as informative as possible. That's one way Google will boost your blog post's rank.

If there's any information in your post that's outdated or no longer relevant, replace it with something more up-to-date. Additionally, if there are any resources or sites cited in your content that are no longer available or working, find alternatives.

In expanding your content, you can also add personal experiences as long as they are related to the subject. Adding graphs and recent statistics help as well.

2. Change Old Titles

The title of your post is one of the most important things that make your article more SEO-friendly. So, if you want to be on the first page of search engines, you have to rework your title and make it interesting enough for readers to click.

3. Add Keywords

If your old posts aren't targeting specific keywords, now is the perfect time to add them. Mention your keywords several times within the article to increase your rank in search engines and to boost your blog traffic.

Take note, however, that while adding keywords help, you still need to be careful about where you place them. Keyword stuffing can also hurt your ranking.

To avoid keyword stuffing, you need to make sure that your content reads naturally. You shouldn't be repeating your keywords too frequently when reading the article. Ideally, you should mention the keyword once in the introduction, twice or thrice within the body of the article, and once in the conclusion.

Try to include your target keyword in the title, too.

4. Break Up Your Content Into Sub-Sections

While your goal is to “thicken” your post, you need to make sure that it's still easy to read. Use short sentences and ensure that each paragraph contains no more than four sentences.

Add sub-sections in your content to make it easier to read and for better flow. If you are unsure about what sub-sections to use, you can refer to Google's "People Also Ask" section. It can give you relevant topics to include in your article.

5. Add Better Images

Design and style matter a lot to readers these days. High-quality images attract attention and encourage readers to share the article on social media sites and other related platforms. This, as a result, brings more traffic to the site.

6. Add Internal and External Links

Another way you can boost traffic to your site and keep visitors engaged is to update existing posts and linking them to newer posts. Directing readers to related posts will keep them longer on your site.

Additionally, find external links that can add more value to your content. Links to studies, research findings, and similar data from high authority sites can help increase your blog traffic.

7. Check for Mistakes

Google favors high-quality content. It won't look your way if your posts have spelling and grammar errors as they can make your site less credible. If you aren’t confident in proofreading your own work, you can always ask for your friends’ help. You also have the option to run your content through a spell checker just to be extra sure.

And while you are looking for those mistakes, you should also take that time to find dead links. Fix them as soon as you find them as Google doesn't like encountering error 404 often.

8. Delete Spam Comments

Seeing dozens of spam comments at the end of your posts can hurt your credibility as well as your website's aesthetics. So, as you are updating your content, make sure to scroll down and go over its comments. Delete any spam comment you find.

9. Use tools to improve your content

Improving content often implies making it more relevant. There a host of tools on the web that can help you improve your articles so that they become fresher to the public reading them today. Opt for resources like Quora and Google Trends to collect information on the issues that people find important in the current year. Similarly there are tools that can help you delegate content improvement such as Trust My Paper.

Conclusion

Improving you older articles isn’t rocket science, but it takes some basic understanding of how things work. By applying at least some of these principles you’ll ensure more attractive content for your readers, along with better indexable material for Google, which will help you rank higher in SERPs.

Good luck!

Marie Fincher

Marie Fincher is a content writer at TrustMyPaper.com with a background in marketing, technology and business intelligence. She frequently writes about data science, BI, new marketing trends and branding strategies. Marie gradually changed her focus from working in marketing to writing about it.

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