Have you taken a look at your old blog content recently? If you’ve been running the blog for several years, it’s probably overdue a bit of a clean up.
Why bother? Because both Google and your guests strongly favour fresh, highly relevant content. What’s more, keeping low quality, outdated content on your website can lead directly to fewer clicks and higher bounce rates, which may impact your site’s authority with Google, and ultimately, your search rankings.
Are you clinging on to outdated content?
To decide whether you’re guilty of hoarding unnecessary content, it’s time to delve into your website analytics. Do you notice any posts which haven’t received even one organic visit in the previous three months? If you do, these posts are in urgent need of some attention.
Sometimes, if a post is really no longer relevant, the only option is to remove it from your website altogether. But in most cases, all it takes is a few tweaks to optimise older content and boost the SEO power of your blog.
How to boost older content
Once you’ve identified the posts which aren’t getting viewed, leading to bookings or ranking as highly as you’d like, you can either delete them and use 301 redirects to other posts, or optimise them so that they perform better. Here are some tips:
- See what your high ranking competitors are doing. Closely study the pages that are ranking for your competitors for the same target keywords. What are they getting right? How many words are they using per page? What about the use of images? Any strategies you can learn from?
- Ensure your blog’s SEO structure is solid. Take another look at your posts’ headers, title tags, images and other on-page elements. Are you employing SEO best practices throughout?
- Learn from your comments section. Wondering how to improve your posts? Sometimes you’ll find the answer in the posts’ comments section themselves, through the questions your guests ask and the discussions they’re having.
- Don’t forget to update the date of your blog posts. When you’ve finished your revisions, don’t forget to change the publish date of the blog post.
- Promote your updated posts through email and social media. Let your contacts and social audience know that you’ve published a new post – you might even reach out to specific commenter’s to tell them that the post now includes new information that may be of interest.
Revising older content is a great way to bring your blog up to date and generate a powerful SEO boost. That doesn’t mean you should stop posting new content, but sometimes revisiting historic posts is more worthwhile than creating something totally from scratch. Before you publish any content, ask yourself; is it the right content? What are your competitors publishing? Are you guilty of trying to publish too much for the sake of it? If you answer these questions before you start typing, you can create better content from the outset.
Is your hotel’s blog due a clean up? Let us know in the comments below!
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- How To Push Your Hotel’s Blog Posts Up The Search Rankings
