How To Fix Old Blog Post

Today, I want to talk about how to enhance old content. You’ve written some blog post, you have a history of content that maybe you’ve put out in the last six months or a year, or maybe you have some content dating back to 2007 or 2005. It’s sitting on your website, and maybe it’s working, maybe it’s not, but you really don’t know. Maybe you should delete it, maybe you should enhance it, or whatever. In this video, we’re going to talk about enhancing the old content. Now, looking here, there are four different steps to enhancing old content: identify, collect, find the issues, fix.

Identify

First, you need to identify and prioritize the content. So, what content actually needs to be enhanced? Which is actually going to provide us some value by enhancing it? Then, where do we start? Which one do we prioritize? Which one do we do first? The next is it identify what’s wrong with the content. Once we figure out what’s wrong with the content, how do we fix those issues?

Collect

Then we track and monitor the results to see how things are going. We’re going to cover all four of these steps and go into detail on what they mean and how to do them. The first thing, here, is to identify and prioritize the content. You want to use a tool like Google Search Console. They have a section there called Search Analytics. With Search Analytics you’ll be able to identify what content is getting the most impressions or clicks. Then also, as the content creator, you want to think, “Okay, well, what content aligns with your business goals?” You may have written a blog post about some sort of topic that really doesn’t necessarily attract the right client, and yet it’s doing really well. It’s getting a lot of clicks, a lot of traffic to your website, but do you really want to spend your time enhancing that and getting, even more, traffic from that un-quality of a source? The next thing, also, you want to look at is Google Analytics. Here you can look at what content has a high time on page, as far as when people are spending time on the page. What about bounce rates, exit rates, and conversion rates? You can identify which pieces of content are doing kind of good, or maybe they’re doing great but maybe they could do better. We can start seeing the metrics start seeing the numbers, and we can really identify what it is that’s going to move the needle and make improvements. Now, we have other videos on this channel that go into detail about the content and how to find this information, impression, and clicks, and then also what content has time on page for analytics. We have videos on that. I’ll put links to those here so you can click on over to those and go through that process.

Find The Issues

The next thing here is, we’re going to identify what’s wrong with the content. There’s a couple of things that could be wrong it. Number one, it doesn’t get enough clicks. It has a low click-through rate. That means Google is showing it a lot, so it has some decent impressions. It’s being seen. But the click-through rate, the amount times it actually gets clicked on from the SERPs, from the organic traffic, it’s really low. How do we fix that? We’ll get into that.The next thing is, it may have a high bounce rate or exit rate. That means when people are coming to it, they don’t go anywhere else. They don’t engage deeper into your website. Identifying this and seeing this will help you identify what kind of changes that need to be made to that particular piece of content to encourage people to stay or look deeper into your website. Low time on page. Are they only there for like five seconds? Or are they just coming in and barely reading anything? How does the website look? How does that page look in terms of that? Now, look at the low position. That means in the search results … That’s what SERP’s means is Search Engine Result Pages, and then the S is the plural.You’re not on page one, it’s pretty obvious. But, let’s say you have a lot of impressions. You can see this data where how many times you are shown in the search results. If you’re on page two, three, four, or five, and there are a significant amount of impressions, that means that if you were to be on page one, the impressions would be a whole lot more. A lot of people don’t go to page two. If you’re getting a lot of impressions on page two, that means Google is showing a lot of people that, and so that means it usually can double or triple a number of impressions by being on page one. The next one is a low readability score. This is going to be an indication of how easy it is to read the content on your website. If it has a low readability score, then fewer people are going to be able to even comprehend it or read it. Then also, Google has an algorithmic way that they determine the quality of content based on the grammar, and the readability, and all those sorts of things. Definitely could be an issue in terms of that. Now, page load speed. This is how fast your website loads. When we get to the section about fixing things, we’ll show you where to get the optimization efforts. You can go to Page Speed Insights. You can look in Google Search Console. You can also look in Google Analytics, it will also have page load times, information for that. The next thing is low conversions. Now, a conversion is when someone takes some sort of action on your website that you’re tracking. In the photography world, typically, we look at a conversion as an inquiry. So, someone’s sending out that form on your website and reaching out to you. With Google Analytics, you can track conversions. When you start looking at conversion rates, for every 100 visits, if you get one inquiry, then now that is a 1% conversion rate. You can look at different pages that have different conversion factors and things like that. It gets a little more complicated when you start looking at conversion, and it’s not necessarily something that is absolutely trackable, or actually tracked by a lot of photographers, but definitely something that, if you could set that up, would have a very strong impact on identifying what’s wrong. Now, that we’ve identified what’s wrong with the content … And again, this is going to be looking at, not just overall, but looking at specific pieces of content and scoring them independently of each other, and looking at an individual blog post.

Fix

Now, we need to fix the issues. Fixing the page title and meta descriptions will increase the click-through rate. Google uses the page title and meta description to determine what they show in the SERPs, in the search results, Google pulls your page out of meta description. When you’re trying to get a click from Google over to your website, the way that that page title meta description read can directly impact the click-through rate. The other thing that impacts click-through rate is the position. You need to raise position to get higher click-through rate. Above and beyond that, the page title meta description. Is it compelling? Would you want to click on it? Look at the people that are ranking for whatever keyword is that you’re trying to rank for, wherever that content is targeting, and look at who else you’re up against. Add a call to action, that’s what CTA stands for, to fix bounce rates, exit rates, and conversions. When a user is reading a piece of content that you have and you see that they bounce, or they exit, or they don’t convert, add some sort of button to get them to either engage deeper in the website, or to submit an inquiry, or to download some sort of content upgrade, or something that you have. People want to be told what to do. When they get to a bottom of a piece of your website, what is it you can have them do next? What’s the user intent? Why are they there? What are they doing reading for that? What’s the idea? What kind of information are you getting, and then how can you give them more of the same information? Or understanding their intent, how can you give them the next piece of the puzzle or something else that would help enhance what they’re already interested in? Fix the copy quality copy is just the words, to fix the time on page and the readability score. There’s a tool here called Hemingway App. You can enter the content and it’ll identify where the trouble spots are. It’ll let you know if something is hard to read, or if you have passive voice and adjectives. Whatever the problem is it will help you identify, run-on sentences, things like that. This is a quick way for you to quickly identify the trouble spots. Instead of just looking at the whole thing, you’re looking at individual things that are highlighted, and Hemingway App is really good for that. The next one here is webpagefx.com. There’s a readability score, and you can see what you’re readability score is of the content. I usually shoot for between 6th to 9th-grade reading level, because if you get into a 12th or plus, anything above 10, 12, reading level, it just means it’s more complex. Complexity doesn’t necessarily a sign of quality. We want to make it super easy to read so that it is easy to digest and people don’t have to think much when they’re reading stuff.The next thing here is to add content depth. The Mozbar function where you can enter in a target keyword and then it’ll let you know some of the pieces of the depth and the things that people are talking about that are ranking for that. It looks at your competitors and gives you maybe some things you overlooked. If you’re talking about a specific topic, maybe you mention two, or three, or four, items about that topic, but maybe there’s five, six, seven, more than you didn’t cover that everyone else is covering but you’re not. It helps you identify those depth gaps and make sure you covering all that stuff. The next thing is, for page load speed, you want to fix image size, minification, compression, or caching. Google has this really cool tool, there’s a link here, testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com that you can go to to help fix those issues.The next thing here is the track and monitor. There’s a custom dashboard available that you can install on your Google Analytics. You should go to turnerwebservices.com/dashboard and it will redirect you over to Google where I’ve shared a template. When you’re logged into your Google Analytics account, and you go to that site, it’ll automatically set it up and install it there for you.Then Google Search Console is another place that you can track. Now, the thing is, they only will give you 90 days worth of data. You can set a calendar, some sort of alert to remind you, but every 90 days you can go in and download these search analytic data and be able to capture that so you can look at it over time. Now, you can go in there right now and look from today and the 90 days back, but then as you move forward, you want to be able to track a longer period of history to also help you identify those issues. You can look at individual pages and individual pieces of content so that you can see that if the changes that you made have made an improvement.
This is a 30,000-foot view, high level, of how to enhance old content. If you like any more information or any details on any specific thing that I mentioned that is kind of vague or didn’t really get addressed, definitely in the comments below, let me know, or you could email me directly over at support@turnerwebservices.com. We love to have any questions or comments or anything. I’d also like to welcome you too. Let me know what happens. If you go in here and you try this out, and you make some improvements, and then you get a couple extra clients, or you get a bunch of extra traffic to your website that turns into ultimately more clients, then I’d definitely like to hear that and hear the success stories. Thanks again for checking us out, and be sure to subscribe for more videos just like this.