Do you have a blog with tons of old posts on it, dating back to the days of yore when blogging was less of an exact science and SEO wasn’t heard of? Well, there’s no reason to waste that old content, and chances are good it’s not getting any eyeballs any longer. Pull out your old posts, dust ‘em off and give ‘em a little love by updating and optimizing them. Updating counts as fresh content marketing in Google’s eyes, and if you can draw readers to them and keep traffic flowing without additional work, your website will score. 
Pick a Post
Not all your previous blog posts will work for this, especially those that are more than two years old. Start by choosing two or three of your best blog posts that you think are still relevant to your target audience, and read them carefully to determine whether the information needs to be updated. Don’t actually do the work yet, just make notes while you evaluate which ones are right for the task.
Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important aspect of revitalizing your old blog posts and giving them a new lease on life. Once you’ve selected a few possible posts, pull out the keywords in each post that relate to your market. Use https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home or a similar paid tool to research the keywords you’ve identified, and only choose those posts with keywords in the content that have reasonable search numbers. If 5 people are searching for that keyword each month, it’s not worth spending the effort on it. Your research will help you to narrow down your choice to those old blog posts that contain keywords—or information that you can update with keywords—that are sought-after currently.
Use Best SEO Practices
Once you’ve got your post and your keyword, edit the copy carefully and update it as you go using best business blogging practices:
- Revisit facts and statistics contained in the copy, and research them for the latest numbers.
- Edit the information you identified as being out of date.
- Add your main keyword in a logical fashion once in your first 100 words, once in your last paragraph and roughly once in every 200 words so as not to over-optimize the text. If you have to rewrite a paragraph to fit it in context, then do so.
- Use secondary keywords not more than once or twice each throughout the post.
- Include hyperlinks to authoritative sources using descriptive anchor text that contains your primary or secondary keywords.
- Add your primary keyword in the title, preferably in the first 40 characters, and set up at least one H2 subheading that contains the keyword as well.
- Create a new post with the same title as the old one, and redirect it to the original post before you modify the old URL to reflect the new title. This helps to avoid breaking any backlinks to the old post that exist on other sites, which is bad SEO policy and can cause your blog to lose rank.
- Images are important in SEO, so add a new image or three if appropriate to bring the post into the “here and now,” and update the alt text or title on your images to include the keyword.
- Add your primary and secondary keywords in the tag field so they help to identify the post for searches.
- Lastly, check your blog categories and make sure the post is included in All Posts as well as in one or two relevant categories (not too many).
If you’re working on a Wordpress or HubSpot platform you’ll have multiple tools at your disposal for doing an SEO check. In Wordpress, the light alongside SEO on the right should be green, and by clicking on the word “Check” you can get the inbuilt page analysis to tell you if you’ve overlooked any major issues.
Go Social
It’s entirely likely that at the time you first wrote the original blog post, social media as a way to attract visitors was either non-existent or somewhat more antiquated than it is now. Share your post across all your social networking profiles and use it to generate engagement. If you’ve accumulated a few decent comments on the post over time, keep them there and respond to them if you haven’t already done so.
Your old posts still have lots of potential for bringing you traffic, and they give you the option to update your site without doing a large amount of work.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
