How to Turn Old Blog Posts into Evergreen SEO Content
We all have old blog post on our websites that aren’t doing much for our SEO efforts. Maybe the post itself gets some traffic from Google but you know that it is poorly written and could be doing much more for your website. You have three options that will improve your overall site quality. One, you could just leave it. Two, you could just delete it and move on. Or option number three, you can rewrite the content and make it a powerful piece that is evergreen and bring visitors to your website.
How to Find Old Poorly Written Post
The first place I start is within your blog management system. Most people use WordPress and you can go through the post summaries and look for word counts. I usually look for posts that are less than 600 words. I then create a list of these posts with their URLs.
Next, I would then use my analytics software and check to see how much traffic those pages are getting in the past 30 days. This will give you an idea how well the current content is performing. But don’t automatically think the article with the lowest amount of traffic is the one you need to rewrite. Take the bottom ten performing articles and then you will need the next step to determine the potential.
Find the Right Keywords
Now that you have identified the ten least trafficked articles on your blog you will need to do keyword research. For each of these blog posts I would use SEMRush Keyword Analytics Tool and determine the keyword potential for each one. This tool will give you phrase match and related keywords with their respected search volume. This is the tool that will help you ensure you are shooting for the right keywords.
SEO can be hard enough but if you choose the wrong keywords it makes it nearly impossible. Within the SEMRush tool you can also see the keyword difficulty as it’s labeled as “KD” in the report. This number is a percentage from 1%-100% with the higher the number the more difficult it will be to rank for a given keyword. Don’t let higher number here discourage you. If you put in good SEO efforts you can rank well for those keywords too. Now you can pick which article you want to rewrite about. You don’t always have to go after the biggest keywords but you can make an educated decision based on all the factors you have in your research now.
Rewriting the Content
Now it’s time to actually rewrite the article. Most articles don’t need to be completely rewritten. You can usually take some of the content and incorporate it into the new content. We did this recently on a post about SEO for plastic surgery websites.
Before I proceed to rewrite the article I find all the related semantic keywords. Semantic keywords are words that are associated with the topic you are writing about. These can be an important signal in telling Google how through and related your content is to the main keywords. The SEO Tool Writing Assistant provides you with a list of the twenty most important semantic words for your article. Write these words down and uses them within your article.
In the next step I use the SEMRush topic research tool. This tool gives you questions and related search topics. This helps create a great outline of the content you should include when you rewrite the article. In order to create evergreen content you need to be a complete resource on the topic you are writing about.
Now that you have the outline of what the article should include and the semantic keywords its time to get writing. Again, you don’t want another poorly written short article. You are setting out to create a resource that can be used by others to learn about the subject you are writing on. This will be very helpful for SEO as it will create a linkable asset.
Promotion of Content
Most people think that writing a post is all you have to do. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. You can place the most comprehensive article ever written about a subject on a blog but without promoting your content it will not get seen.
Start with identifying potential blogs that post similar content to the topic you have written about. Then reach out to these blogs and see if you can write an article to contribute to their blog. This can be hard work and be time consuming. Within the articles you can link to your blog post as a reference. The harder you work here can determine how high your article will rank in the search engines.
Final Thoughts
Content is still very much king when it comes to SEO and Google. Putting a good strategy in place to identify content that needs to be upgraded can be a powerful way to drive more traffic to your website.