SEO Onpage Essentials: How to always publish fresh content

Simply put, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means making sure your business website is as good as it can be. 

To be a bit more specific, what is SEO?

SEO is a combination of:

• Technical. Your website’s download speed and overall accessibility to humans and bots.

• Onpage. Your existing content and how well it’s tagged.

• Offpage. Your business and website’s relationship with the external world, linkbuilding, outreach and PR.

We specialise in small business SEO services and many of our clients ask us: our website and its content needs a complete revamp, should we start from scratch? And how do we go about it?

Don’t ever start from scratch. Please. The trick to a healthy website for both users and bots is good housekeeping and knowing a few tricks.

Categorising and repurposing old content

If you’ve been publishing blog posts for a number of years then you’re in a great position. If not, start doing it today.

If you have a number of blog posts already it’s a good idea to audit them. 

You can go as granular as you like here but essentially start with looking at some kind of traffic measure next to word count for all blog posts.

So, get all your blog posts in one spreadsheet and look at traffic to these pages from their publish date up to now. Perhaps segmenting traffic into 6 months intervals from their publish date.

Why? Well we need to go a little beyond the obvious. If a blog post that was published three years ago has not been viewed at all in the last six months you might be tempted to delete it. Please don’t.

Take a look at the overall traffic this blog post got. Did it peak at any point in its life cycle? Or has it always been low?

Either way, if you’re looking at it - it means that you need to mark this page down as one that needs a decision to be made on. That’s right, don’t just delete it yet.

For the blog posts with average traffic that’s clearly peaked and is now zero ask yourself why? Was it just thin content, say below 350 words? Maybe the angle wasn’t just quite right? Re-read the post.

Knowing what you know now. How would you improve this article? Can you bring it back to life?

For the pages with consistently low traffic for a substantial period ask yourself why? Be honest. Perhaps it was just that your users weren’t interested in the topic. It’s not a failure - you’ve learnt something.

Put all your blog posts into categories. Something like: 1 is performing well and 7 is worst performing. 

The key here is to NOT see your blog posts as either keep or delete, at the risk of a cliché: see all your blog posts as shades of grey not black and white.

What are your options for repurposing your articles and always be publishing fresh content?

1. Keep the article as it is but add a brief update and add a new date on it and bring it to your users’ attention.

2. Completely rewrite the article keeping the same angle and try again as perhaps that topic might be in vogue now. 

3. Reference the article in a quote within a new article on a slightly different angle of this topic.

4. Combine a number of articles into a white paper and ask users to submit an email to download it.

5. Combine an article with another article and publish a new, more in-depth article and 301 the old article urls to them.

6. As a last resort admit defeat and archive the article on a local drive and 301 the url to your blog homepage.

Remember there are many ways to repurpose articles and these are just some of them. Get creative, but never duplicate content or bore your readers.