How revamping articles helped us grow our blog to 100,000+ sessions a month

In an ideal world, all of our blog pages would contain high-quality, up-to-date content, rank well in SERPs for our targeted keywords, and have a substantial amount of monthly traffic that generates leads for our business.

But back on Earth.

Whenever we go through our Google Analytics dashboards, we might often find quite a few low-performing pages with little to no traffic.

It happens, sure. You don't always write a masterpiece.

Our goal as content marketers, however, should be to minimize the number of these pages. Take it as a zero-waste policy translating into content marketing. Or, if zero is not an option, at least a minimum-waste policy.

One of my favorite tactics to do this is revamping old blog posts practically on a business-as-usual basis.

I've been doing that continuously since August/September 2019 and our traffic has been going up exponentially ever since. Don't just take my word for it:

This month, our blog traffic saw 200+% YoY growth, which, broken down to numbers, means 100,000+ sessions and almost 125,000 page views.

Today, I'd like to share with you some of my learnings and tips on how to grow your blog traffic by means of updating articles.

Of course, this is only one of the tactics, but it's a powerful way to keep your content relevant and attractive in the crawling "eyes" of our friend Google.

Let's start off with Blog Revamping 101:

What the heck does revamping mean?

Revamping, updating, reviving, face-lifting, upgrading, ... call it whatever you prefer.

They're all synonyms of taking something (in this case an article) that already exists and making it better, brighter, and, most importantly, more valuable for the target reader.

In practice, you take a blog post that doesn't perform as well as it could and improve it by:

1. Rewriting or updating outdated content
2. Adding new relevant sections into the piece or cutting irrelevant ones
3. Updating the title and meta description
4. Re-optimizing the piece for search queries that makes sense for your business
5. Improving the formatting and headings (adding H2s, H3s, etc.)
6. Changing the visuals such as the header image, social sharing image, body images, videos and optimizing their titles and alt tags
7. Reviewing the outbound and inbound links (removing irrelevant ones, replacing them with/adding fresh ones)

...and then republish it under the same URL but with a new date.

That last sentence is very important here. You can (and should) change the publishing date of the article but by no means change the URL of the article.

Otherwise, the whole point of updating the content piece is lost.

Our goal here is to take a page that is already indexed and has gained some traction but for some reason doesn't perform as well as it could.

That brings me to the next point:

What type of blog posts should you be revamping?

It's fair to say that not all underperforming blog posts deserve revamping.

Some are simply not useful for your business anymore, or not relevant in this space and time anymore, and revamping them may just be a waste of time.

Now, here are some types of posts that deserve to be revamped:

• Blog posts in which you target strategically important keywords for your business (the ones that drive relevant traffic to your site)
• Articles with the potential to be evergreen posts -- in-depth articles that contain useful information and give long-lasting value to your reader or buyer persona (but are outdated to some extent)
• Blogs that target keywords or queries with high search volume and - with improved ranking in SERP - may bring substantial traffic to your site
• Articles on topics that your competitors rank well for but you don't

And here are some kinds of articles that you shouldn't revamp:

• Blogs that are younger than 6 months - these may not have had enough time to gain traction and rank (or may not have been indexed yet) and may still catch on
• Articles that discuss a topic that is no longer relevant or searched for
• Articles that don't make sense for your business (don't generate relevant leads)

Okay, now we know what to do and which articles do we wanna do that to. Before I jump into the how, let's stop for a minute at the why.

Why should you revamp?

Long story short, because second time's the charm (sometimes third or fourth :).

Short story long, because you want to increase organic traffic to your site.

You may have plenty of great content written already. Content that is strategically important for your business but is sitting somewhere in the back of the Google index, covered in dust because it didn't really hit the mark.

It's important to analyze why it didn't hit the mark and work on improving it.

Do it well and you can:

• Improve your SEO: Rank better in SERPs for your strategically important queries by giving your content a fresh boost, improving its quality, optimizing it better, adding relevant internal/external links, etc.
• Increase the conversion rate: Boost CTR by giving your piece a more catchy, up-to-date title, boost average time spent on your page by improving the UX (formatting) and helping people navigate better through your piece. Use better CTAs to convert your readers, etc.
• Save time and money: You don't always have to create new content. Instead, work with what you already have and improve it -- it will pay off.
• Build your brand: Every time a prospect or a customer lands on a quality piece of content on your site, it makes your brand more trustworthy in their eyes and sets a foundation for your thought leadership. Every time they land on a page that's poor in quality, the opposite thing happens.

If you still need more reasons why here's another one: It works.

Again, don't just take my word for it. Here are three screenshots from our Google Analytics, showing the stats of our three revamped articles.

The green arrows point to the approximate revamping date.

Not bad, is it?

And here's a fun fact: 6/10 of our best-performing articles are, actually, articles that were revamped at least once.

Now to the how.

Best practices for making the most out of revamping

Over the months I've been actively updating outdated articles, I've collected several tips that I found working really well.

The process usually starts months or years before the article is revamped. Ergo - at the very time an article is being written. Let me explain:

1. While writing new content, keep in mind that one day you might want to revamp it

First, this means: Write elegant slugs (slug is the part of the URL after your domain and subdomain values, e.g: blog.yoursite.com/slugslug/ OR yoursite.com/blog/slugslug/).

Avoid /10-tips-to-revamp-content-while-working-remotely-and-binge-watching-netflix/.

In fact, avoid putting numbers in slugs altogether. Maybe a year from now, you'll be adding 5 new tips and while your title says '15 tips', your URL says '10-tips'. It's not elegant and unnecessarily calls attention to the fact that it's a revamped article.

Just keep the URLs neat and put only the keywords you're optimizing the article for, such as /content-revamping-tips/.

This is especially true with content that you write periodically, for example tips for the upcoming year.

Say you write a post about "Instagram engagement tips for 2020". Chances are that next year you'll want to write "Instagram engagement tips for 2021". Hence, don't write a post with a slug /instagram-engagement-tips-2020/ because next year, the post will be outdated.

Write a piece with a slug /instagram-engagement-tips/ and next year, revamp the original 2020 piece with tips for 2021.

2. Create heat maps for your content

Thanks to heat maps, you will be able to track how your readers move around the post, what they click on, and to what depth do they typically scroll. Based on that, you'll be able to tweak things like CTAs, headlines, formatting, links, etc.

Once you do a revamp, always create a new heat map so you can track changes in your readers' behavior and see whether your update had a positive effect.

By the way, I use Hotjar - it's super simple.

3. Use Google Search Console to do keyword analysis for pieces that you want to revamp

Once you identified an article that you want to revamp because it lost its rankings or because it doesn't get much traffic, it's time to dive into keywords.

There are multiple ways to do this. One of them is via Google Search Console.

Check the performance of the article in GSC for any given period of time and scroll down to 'Queries' where you'll see which queries most clicks to this article come from, the number of impressions it gets in SERP, its average CTR, and its average position in SERP.

I'd like to show you two scenarios that may lead your revamping strategy.

1/Not great, not terrible: You rank quite well (avg. position 4-7) for hot keyword/s with high search volume and huge relevance for your business, but not well enough.

Below, there's a screenshot from GSC for my article about Virtual Icebreakers. It got thousands of impressions in the last 6 months for queries around zoom icebreakers, yet only about 3% of people who saw the article in SERP actually clicked it.

If I want to get more traffic from these queries, I need the article to rank higher for these keywords. What I can do then is to increase the mention of Zoom in my article and emphasize the fact that the icebreakers present in my article are suitable for Zoom meetings.

2/ Missed the mark: Despite your original intention to target queries around keyword X (or with search intent X), you will find out that your article ranks best for queries around a different keyword (or different search intent), keyword Y.

In this instance, you may want to re-optimize your content for keyword Y. You may actually completely ditch the keyword X and rewrite the content so it only covers topic Y (if it's that specific).

Here's an example. Below, you can see a screenshot from GSC for our article "How to give a killer presentation" -- listing tips for presenters on how to give a great speech.

However, when I sorted impressions top-down - you can see that the article gets the most exposure for queries around "how to greet" in a presentation or in a speech.

It doesn't actually rank all that well for more general queries around "presentation tips" or "tips for presenters". And that's okay. There are plenty of articles covering that topic.

This fact actually gives us a great opportunity to optimize the content for these very specific queries and write the best content that the searchers with this search intent will find.

4. Do little tweaks here and there

You don't always have to do big rewrites if you want to see promising results.

Sometimes, to give your posts a little boost, all it takes is to update the title, meta descriptions, alt tags in images, rewriting the intro, optimize the headings, etc.

And this applies also to posts that perform quite well. Again, Google Search Console can reveal plenty of secrets. For example, my post where I list examples of poll questions ranks pretty well for my desired queries. However, I can see that despite ranking in the top 3 positions for keywords around "funny/fun polls", there's not a huge CTR to my post.

The impression rates are quite impressive, yet the post doesn't get as much traffic from these.

These specific queries tell me that people search for poll questions that are fun. And since the title of my post doesn't specifically say they're 'fun' poll questions, people are possibly discouraged from clicking through. About time to change that, right?

5. "Spy" on your competitors

If you want to improve rankings for your content and beat other sites that rank above you, it's important to know who you're up against. I call this SEO wars.

Do a qualitative on-SERP analysis of sites that rank on the first positions for your desired queries. Read through them and make notes: What type of content do they contain? What titles do they have? What information do they provide that your content piece does not?

In short: In what respects are they better than your article?

This will give you plenty of ideas for how to update your existing content and make it richer and more valuable. Strive to create a piece that's the best out there for a particular topic.

Another way to do a competitor analysis is through an SEO tool such as Ahrefs or Moz (I use the former). Ahrefs has this very useful tool called 'Site explorer' that will basically give you insights into any site, what keywords it ranks for, which domains link to this page, etc.

A part of the Site Explorer tool is the 'Content Gap' feature where you can actually compare your content against your competitors' sites that cover similar topics. With this tool, you can identify where your content piece falls short and collect more ideas on how to make your article better. Check out how it works here:

6. Improve your article's readability and formatting

Google crawls millions of pages every minute. Make it easier for the engine to read your page and understand what's it about. Write shorter sentences and less content-heavy paragraphs. Make your article "airy", divide the content into logical sections using H2s and H3s, use less complicated words.

There are multiple apps that will analyze your text and evaluate the readability score of your content. For example, I use the Yoast plugin in WordPress or the Hemingway app.

7. Don't over-optimize

Last but not least, don't overdo it with SEO. Don't overuse your targeted keyword in your text, it won't read right. Long gone is the time when this tactic worked. Google is smart now, it will recognize a scam right away.

Use synonyms of your targeted keyword as well so you don't sound repetitive. That applies to image alt tags as well - don't name and alt tag every image in your blog using the same set of words - it's suspicious and counterproductive.

You can hear many content marketers and SEOs say that you should - first and foremost - write for your readers, not for search engines.

With that message, I think it's time for me to sign off.

Kudos to you - a person who made it to the end! I hope this was useful. What's your favorite content marketing hack? Let me know.

Byeee x