Blog Content Strategy Includes Existing Posts

An effective blog content strategy should include a regular review of old posts to see which ones have value as evergreen content. They have great potential to attract even more.

Sometimes the best parts of a blog are overlooked by the blogger because they are old and forgotten posts. But that doesn’t mean the search engines have forgotten about them.

Bloggers may get so caught up in content, marketing, advertising and production issues every day that they don’t have the time to look back. Making time will pay dividends.

Content Strategy Tip

A blog content strategy begins with a simple task. Scheduling reminders in a calendar is helpful in staying on top of content tasks that don’t need to happen every day.

These are the tasks that often slip away simply because they are not habitual. The hardest ones to track are yearly, followed by monthly and then weekly.

A weekly or monthly review of existing blog content is helpful in growing a site’s revenue and audience. When the calendar says it is time to do the review, publishers and writers can check site analytics for older posts that are still drawing traffic from search engines and other sources.

In Google Analytics, one of those data points is the Entrances report.

In Analytics, click on Behavior, Site Content and All Pages. The second column from the right should show Entrances, which is the number of people who came directly to that page from an outside source.

Click on the word Entrances to put the most popular ones at the top. These top performers represent great opportunities to increase site revenue and audience. Start with tackling 10 at a time.

More Updates, Higher Rankings

On one actual blog, the top performing post on the entire site is more than three years old. It has grown to the number one position in Google search results for its primary keyword phrase and quite a few secondary ones as well.

Fairly high rankings in the beginning led to more work on the post, which led to even higher rankings.

Over the last several years since it was written, it has grown in the amount of content and graphics. The blogger has added links to it from other posts and social media accounts.

He has refreshed the content so that it remains relevant with the times. He continues to review the post every month.

That same blogger has done the same thing to other posts and for the most part seen similar results.

So it is not enough to write a post and forget about it. If the post has evergreen value, return to it every now and then via analytics to see if it merits additional work. Use internal linking to drive more traffic to the best posts, especially ones with high engagement in the form of time on page.

Poor Performers

On the flip side, poor performers may not merit any attention at all. They may require a major effort to save them from oblivion.

It may be tempting to say, forget it, just let it fade away. But first answer a few questions:

• Is the theme of the post interesting or important?
• Is it long enough? The length standard for quality, authoritative online content is at least 600 words if not 1,000 or more.
• Does it have poor grammar? Search engines recognize misspellings and other writing errors.
• Is the poor performance the result of poor search engine optimization?
• Does it have any graphics? Are the graphics unique and original?
• Do prominent internal links point to it?

A badly written 400-word post might have a new life with search engines with a little effort. For example, bloggers may expand it to 600 words, add one or two graphics and give it an SEO facelift.

That’s much easier to do than writing an entirely new 600-word post from scratch on the same topic.

So try to find the time to check analytics regularly to see which posts have value in some form. Then find the time to enhance the ones with the most potential.

Even just adding a few paragraphs will take only a few minutes of precious time.