- Look, if you want more search traffic
everyone's going to to tell you that you need
to keep creating more and more content.
But there's already a billion blogs on the web.
That's roughly one blog for every seven people.
There's too much content!
You know what you should do if you want more traffic?
You rank your old content.
Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to share with you
how you can rank your old content.
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Everyone says, "Hey, old, outdated content,
it's not going to rank anymore."
That's a bunch of baloney.
You can do it.
Did you know that even though I create one new article
per week on neilpatel.com, my team and I,
we're updating over 90 articles per month
that are old and outdated.
That's what's driving us roughly four million visitors
a month.
And I'm going to share with you my exact formula
so you can replicate it.
The first thing I want you to do
is use Google Search Console and Ubersuggest
and combine them together.
So with Google Search Console,
you're going to see your traffic over time, per page.
What I want you to look for is your old articles
that are dipping.
Your old articles that are dipping
and getting less and less traffic over time,
that means they need to be refreshed and updated.
So what I want you to do is look at those articles
that are dropping in traffic in Google Search Console,
take those keywords that that article's ranking for
and put them within Ubersuggest.
It'll tell you all the other phrases, long-tell versions
that get traffic.
Now, I want you to go back to that article
that Google Search Console showed is losing traffic.
That old, outdated piece of content.
Look at it, and be like,
Hm, what can I do to make this page better?
What's outdated?
What needs to be removed?
What needs to be fixed?
And I want you to do all those things.
Because when you put the user first
you're much more likely to rank better.
But its not just about updating and making it fresh.
Its also about expanding it and making it more thorough
and better than all the other competitors.
So by using Ubersuggest you can look at all
the other long-tell phrases, the question and answers.
This will all help you figure out user intent
when they're searching.
By integrating all these other phrases and keywords
within the article you're making it much more thorough,
so you'll find that your older content will rank better.
The second thing I want you to do is work on improving
your click-through rates through your title
and meta description tags.
So there's this tool out there called ClickFlow.
And what ClickFlow does is just only helps you optimize
your title tag and meta description click rates.
It's a simple thing to do but very few SEOs do it.
Remember, just because you rank number two or three or five
on Google doesn't mean that you need to rank higher
to get more traffic.
If you convince more people to click on your listing
over the competitor's by optimizing your copy
and your title tag and your meta description,
you're going to crush it.
But here's the key to all of this.
If you create something that's persuasive, you'll do better.
And then over time your rankings will go up because
Google knows that hey, if more people are clicking on
the fifth listing in the page one
instead of the fourth listing
that means we should probably move the fifth listing
to fourth and the fourth one to the fifth spot.
But you can't just make a change
and expect it to miraculously work.
ClickFlow will guide you
and it'll tell you what changes to make in your title tag
and your meta description
to maximize your click-through rate.
The third thing I want you to do is delete your old articles
that no longer are relevant.
For example, I had articles on my blog related to Vine.
Twitter shut down Vine.
I could update it, but what's the point of updating
a article on a service or a company that no longer exists.
So, I don't want you to just delete your old content
that's irrelevant anymore, that can't be updated.
I want you to take those articles and 301 redirect them
to the most relevant articles.
That way you're pushing more juice
into the more relevant ones, and they rank better.
The next thing I want you to do
is push more internal links to your older articles.
As you write newer content
you forget about your older pieces of content.
Those gems that still can do well.
So I want you to take all these new pieces of content
that you're writing
and link to the old articles when it makes sense.
You're putting more life into the old pieces of content.
That way they rank higher.
Heck, you can even take these old pieces of content,
the ones that do really well, these cornerstone pages,
and put them in your sidebar and link to them, right?
They can be your most popular articles.
The fifth thing I have for you
is embed multimedia into your old articles.
Look, nowadays there's videos, podcasts,
there's infographics,
on whatever you have written about in the past.
So take some of these pieces and integrate them
into your old articles.
It brings new life to them.
Makes them more fresh.
And best of all, it improves your time on site,
reduces your bounce rate.
It tells Bing and Google, hey, this page, people love it.
It has amazing user metrics, maybe we should rank it higher.
And that's what you'll find as you embed more multimedia.
If you look at a lot of my old content on neilpatel.com
you'll notice there's a ton of multimedia in there.
Why?
Because I found that it improves my rankings.
Specifically improves my time on site,
which indirectly has improved my rankings.
The sixth thing I want you to do
is adjust the last updated date
for your old pieces of content.
So if your old pieces of content were in five years ago
and you make a ton of changes,
you should adjust the day on when that article was updated
and notify Google.
This is easy to do within WordPress.
If you don't have WordPress, it's going to vary per CMS,
but by updating the date that it was updated or published,
what you'll find is Google will be like, wow!
You just breathed new life into this old article.
Not only did you update it, the timestamp is different,
people should see it, they'll start pushing it higher
and higher up.
Google doesn't want to rank old, nasty, stale content
compared to new, fresh stuff as often.
So take your old stuff, you don't have to rewrite it,
but as you update it, update the date as well.
And don't be sneaky, and just be like,
oh, let me update one sentence, and then update the date.
Google's not going to like that.
I don't recommend that.
Only update the date when you update a ton of the content.
The last thing I want you to do
is promote your old content consistently.
So as you update it, you can see who is sharing
your competitor's articles that are similar.
You can go to that URL, put it into Twitter
and see who tweeted it out, and ask them to tweet it.
And by breathing new life
and marketing your old content again and again,
it's going to improve this rankings, right?
Google's looking at are your old pieces of content
continually building links?
Are they continually generating social shares?
All these factors matter.
Maybe not in the short run, but in the long run
all these little things add up
and that's when you see the boost in rankings.
Now when you do all these things
you'll notice that your old content
won't just go from ranking at a mediocre place
to ranking at the top of page one,
it'll slowly climb up.
It's very rare that Google just takes you
from being bottom of page three to top of page one.
They slowly and gradually move you up.
But when you combine all this stuff,
your old outdated content will start ranking higher.
And if you need more help
improving your search traffic, your rankings,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
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