There may be many of your old blog posts that almost made it to the Google search rankings – but you left them abandoned without a second thought, and ran away to write fresh posts. The blogosphere is littered with blog posts that, given a tweak, could become renewed streams of traffic, conversions, and revenue.
Have you ever given thought to periodically reviewing your old posts and giving them a fresh chance at becoming great performers? Chances are, you may not have given this much attention. Not many people like the chore of revisiting old posts and re-editing them.
But remember, Google changes its algorithms often, and many of your old posts, intended to be evergreen, may have gone a bit brown. Change them around a wee bit, and they’ll become the living goldmines you almost forgot you had!
This little trick has a big name: it’s called “historical optimization”.
What Is Historical Optimization?
HubSpot defines it like this: “Historical optimization means optimizing your “old” blog content so it’s fresh, up-to-date, and has the ability to generate even more traffic and conversions than it already does. By “old,” I just mean posts that already exist on your blog — whether you wrote them last month or three years ago.”
My own definition is a bit different. I’d say, “Historical optimization is about doing what you need to do to make your old posts relevant to Google’s latest algorithms.” This definition suggests you need to stay aware of Google’s latest algorithms – and be able to tweak your old posts to these new expectations.
Why Do You Need To Optimize Old Posts?
Well, here are a few nuggets from Hubspot. When they did the research on their total archive of 6000 posts (to which they were adding 200 new posts a month) they discovered that 76% of their monthly blog views came from “old” posts (i.e. posts published prior to that month) … while 92% of their monthly blog leads also came from “old” posts … and 46% of their monthly blog leads came from just 30 individual blog posts.
If old posts are converting so well, it stands to reason that they must get a look in and an occasional tweak to stay relevant and continue to deliver, right? And look at how the Pareto 80/20 principle applies.
There are always just a fraction of your total blog posts that you write that get you the most traction, traffic, and conversions. Knowing which ones these are, and keeping these “traffic-engines” renewed will pay high dividends for your business.
Which Blog Posts Are Best For Historical Optimization?
Here are the criteria by which you can decide which old blog posts need a refreshing revamp:
1. Articles with low conversion rates
Chances are there are many great posts before that have got plenty of readership, but they haven’t converted readers into email list subscribers. You may have to rereview the buyer you wrote the post for, and the buyer’s journey stage the post addresses.
Then look hard at the CTA (Call-To-Action) on the blog post to see if it follows from the article you’ve written to lead the reader into the next step of the buyer journey. There are many great old articles that never paid much attention to CTAs – or the articles may be still valuable but the CTAs and conversion rates may not be.
2. Articles with high bounce rates
Look next at the articles that people are just bouncing off. The problem in such cases may not be in the quality of your old article – it may just be that you wrote an article with the wrong search intent unmatched by Google’s idea of what the search intent should be. Look at your chosen keyword in Google. See the Google SERP listings and see which type of articles are listed there and what insights they give you about the search intent behind the keyword.
If you have written a great article on solutions for “work depression” but that keyword SERP in Google shows more articles answering the question “What is work depression and why does it occur and what kind of therapists to go to?”, your article is clearly off the mark for that keyword. Either tweak the headline to match a new keyword “solutions for work depression” – or change the whole copy to match the way other listings on the SERP have tackled their articles for the keyword “work depression”.
3. Articles that high-indexed but low-clicked
The problem with old articles that are search-ranking well on Google, but not getting clicked on enough invariably points to the headline or meta-description not being attractive enough. The headline of your blog post has to intrigue and beckon clicks. The meta description has to be written as a teaser that makes people want to see what’s in the article that the meta description hints at but tells fully.
In SEO, everybody worries about rankings, but very few watch to see why, even after good rankings, there is no click-through traffic. When you have given your blog posts a lot to get up the rankings why are you underperforming on the click-through rate? Look again at making the headline or the meta description more click-beckoning.
4. Articles with Page One ranking opportunities
This is a classic old tale. You wrote a blog post in all eagerness and set a tracking tool to check on rankings. Initially, things begin to move and you watch the tracker. Then three months pass and then six months – and the tracker still shows your article at rank #34 on the SERPs. You wait and wait – and then you lose interest and start other articles.
You forget to continue to watch that tracker, and meanwhile, Google may promote you to the foot of the 1st page of the Google SERPs. If you had kept on tracking, you’d have known you were ever so close to the finish line – and with a few determined tweaks, your article could have been in the first three place. Alas, you lost the chance as other wily ones dashed past you to the top … while you thought of yourself as still at #34 on the rankings!
How did you – and why did you – drop the ball? Tch, tch, tch …!
8 Tips For Smart Historical Optimization
Keep this simple checklist handy …
Step 1: Identify all past blog posts worth updating – no matter how much updating will be required, or how little
Make a list of every old blog post that could improve its ratings and performance with a bit of renewal. And don’t just look at major issues like Google rankings.
If you are going to work on the post, look at grammar, language (be up-to-date), paragraph-chunking (for better mobile experience), and even broken links. Look at it with the eyes of a reader this year and not five years ago.
Step 2: Check your own Domain Authority score – and see if you can aim for a high-volume version of your keyword now
When you last wrote the blog post perhaps your Domain Authority (DA) score was low, so you had to look for easier keywords to rank for. If, meanwhile, your site has grown to a higher DA ranking, chances are you may be able to rank the same blog post for a related keyword with slightly more volume – and therefore more difficulty.
If that is the case, then see how to tweak the keyword usage in your post to get it to rank for that more productive higher-volume keyword.
Step 3: Update the content of the post with the aim to achieve 3 key goals – accuracy, freshness, comprehensiveness
When historical optimization is done, it must be done for good reasons and results. Keep an eye on these three factors:
- Accuracy of details (see if there’s new research that’s better or more to-the-point than what you’ve previously used)
- Freshness of content (see if there are new consumer or technological trends that can make your blog post more up-to-the-minute)
- Comprehensiveness (these days Google favors “topics covered” rather than “keywords covered” as the basis of your authority)
Step 4: Optimize for search and conversions (unless both factors work for you, one or the other is a job half-done)
It’s very common to find that your old blog posts are very well-written for information value, but not for conversion value. The purpose of content marketing via blogging is to nudge people one step closer on their buying journeys, towards the products you sell.
By all means, give valuable information – but give your old blog posts “nudge-ability”. Help your readers get “actionable information” that they can use to progress closer to your business objectives.
Image courtesy: Precision Marketing Group
Step 5: Change the publish date of your post (and let Google and the world know there’s a new date there)
A good ploy many historical optimizations include is to add an extra italicized and bracketed line before the post to say “(Freshly updated as of January 20, 2022)”.
One client of mine simply updates the date using this one line and claims that is all the historical optimization he often does … but it works like the blazes. Try it.
Step 6: After historical optimization, remember to freshly promote your updated content (it is a new post after all)
If you use social media, or forums, or aggregator sites to announce new posts, do the same for promoting your historically optimized posts. Make sure you highlight the parts of the post that are brand new.
Let Google and people know that something important has been done to the old blog post to make it relevant and valuable all over again to the old and new audiences who may read it.
Step 7. It’s not just blogs you have to refresh – there are loads of other content you could optimize historically
Remember that blogs are not the only written content you may need to historically optimize. What about the rest of the content on your website, your popups, your free downloadable resources, your landing pages, your funnel pages?
Even non-blog web pages need to rise in search rankings. Collectively they may all raise your brand to new levels.
Step 8. Review the categories of your posts … some of your classic blog categories may grow meaningless with time
If your blog has a lot of categories under which you have slotted your posts, it’s good to check now and again if those category names still have meaning and relevance. Make this exercise a part of your historical optimization routine.
For example, if you’ve had a category called “self-employed single entrepreneurs” you might want to use a smarter word like “solopreneurs”. The lingo of everyday life evolves and so should your blog posts and their categories.
Two Contrary But Successful Historical Optimization Examples
There’s no one way to skin a cat – or to historically optimize your old posts. Read on to see how opposite ideas were used by two content marketers and how successful they were …
1. A case study of a content marketer who successfully “combined and succeeded”
Tony Patrick of Influence & Co, the content marketing agency, mentions his own case study of how he did a content audit of his site for historical optimizations – and discovered three old articles they had written that were more or less similar on a particular topic.
During their exercise, he and his team hit upon the idea of combining all three articles together and saw outstanding success as a result. From 1000 page views and 1 contact gained, they went to 7600 page views and 26 contacts gained!
You can read Tony’s full story here …
2. A contrary case study of a content marketer who successfully “divided and conquered”
Samuel Schmitt, an SEO specialist, writes of his amazing case study where he did the exact opposite of what Tony Patrick did. He was used to writing very long (and, I mean really very long) blog posts.
But then he got the idea to try and split the long-form content into a set of smaller pages linked together and organized hierarchically on his website. He ended up creating a topic cluster that boosted his website traffic by 1000%.
You can read Samuel’s full story here …
In summary … there is no one strict way to do historical optimization. The idea is to improve the quality of your blog posts to keep pace with changing reader expectations and Google algorithms.
But the incontrovertible fact is that you must set apart time to review, renew, republish, and re-promote older articles.
You too – like Tony and Samuel – may well find historical optimizations to be a far more creative and productive exercise than writing new articles!
Do share your thoughts on this topic
I’d love to hear your opinions on the points I’ve made in this blog post. Drop me your views in the Comments Section below.
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