- [Neil] You write all this amazing content,
and after putting in months and months of hard work,
you start getting rankings,
but then you fast forward a year.
A year later, what happens?
Your traffic starts going down.
Hey everyone I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to teach you how to grow your SEO traffic
by updating your old content.
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Here's the simple fact,
there's just too much content on the web.
It's a lot of content from Google to pick for.
Just think of it this way,
there's over a billion blogs.
With over a billion blogs and roughly 7 billion people,
that's one blog for every seven people.
Do you really think we need more blogs
and more people creating content?
Well, if it's unique, sure
but the problem is, most people
are just regurgitating the same old information
over and over again.
For that reason, who's Google going to rank at the top?
Well, if your content is really old
what you'll find is it won't get as much traffic
because what Google wants to do
is they want to rank that fresh, updated content at the top
or new content at the top,
because it is more likely to be more relevant,
have all the latest and greatest updated facts.
For example, if I had an old article
impairing all the social media sites
and I included MySpace and Vine in it,
do you think it's still relevant today?
Of course not because Vine doesn't exist anymore
and MySpace is pretty much dead.
Heck I don't even know if it's still up.
But the point I'm trying to make is
with all the content out there,
Google is going to rank the content
that doesn't just have the most links
or the best on-page SEO.
More importantly, they're going to rank the content
that has the best user experience.
And usually that means that's the content
that is fresh, up to date and the most relevant.
With one of my earlier websites, Nutritionsecrets
I no longer own it.
I was able to build up
literally over 100,000 visitors a month.
And the main strategy that I use
wasn't just cranking out new content,
it was continually updating and expanding my old articles
to get them more and more traffic.
On the neilpatel.com website,
for every blog article I write,
my team is updating 21 old pieces of content.
Now I myself wish I could also update 21 old articles
each and every single week,
I don't have the time for that
so I have a team of three people
that are literally updating my older articles
to make sure they're more relevant,
to make sure they're not giving any false information
because what worked a year ago or two years ago,
what was relevant a year or two ago
may not be relevant anymore.
And if you don't do that, you'll notice that over time,
your old content will start getting less and less traffic.
Now sure, some of your old content is evergreen.
For example, if you have a piece of content
that talks about how to install a toilet,
you don't really need to update it much
but that's not the case with all forms of content.
So how do you go and update your old content
and figure out which pieces to update?
Which ones not to update?
And heck how do you know what parts to update
and how it works?
Do you just add a sentence? Do you add in paragraphs?
Do you add in more images, videos?
Well, I'm going to walk you through that
right now step-by-step.
The first thing I want you to do
is to log into Google Search Console.
When you log into Google Search Console,
you'll see your traffic over the last 28 days,
it default to that,
I know there's roughly 30 days in a month,
but it defaults to 28 days.
That's fine.
And when you log in, you go to your website,
I want you to click that on the pages link.
You'll see that, right?
It's already highlighted here
under or right next to the queries.
The next thing I want you to do is adjust your date range.
So I know I said last 28 days is fine and it is
but to see what old pieces of content
are gaining or losing traffic,
you got to click on that date range,
where it says last 28 days, and then click on compare
and select compare the last 28 days year over year.
This will show you something like this
where it shows your traffic over the last 28 days
versus the 20 days the year before.
And you're already on the pages section
of Google Search Console,
and I want you to sort by the last 28 days
over the previous year.
And when you do that, it'll show you the articles
that were the most popular to least popular
in the previous year.
Now, going through that list, what you want to do
is look for the posts that have lost traffic.
In other words, the number was bigger on the right hand side
than the left hand side
because the left hand side will show you
how much traffic that current article is getting.
So if it's gone down, that means you should update it.
Now with my website
because I update so much content I had to scroll to find it.
You may have to scroll or go to the next page
but if you're not updating content as frequently,
you may see some of these articles towards the top.
So let's look at this one.
This one that is getting less traffic
than it did a year ago it's called
Get Started Using Schema Markup.
I know that may not be the exact name of the article
but it's around schema markup and that is the URL.
And it was getting a bit more than 9,700 visitors a month,
and now it's getting roughly 7,500 visitors a month.
So I want you to click on the article
that was getting more traffic a year ago
and less traffic now.
When I clicked on that article,
I can see that I was getting more traffic
from terms like schema markup, terms like schema SEO,
technically schema SEO I'm doing better now.
There's a few others, schema in SEO, schema code.
So there's quite a few terms
that I was getting more traffic from.
So what you'll want to do is start Googling those terms
to see who's ranking above you.
So let's Google schema markup.
As you can see, there's an article by Moz,
there's an article by Search Engine Journal,
then there's Schema.org.
And what you'll want to do
is click on each of those articles
and analyze them and say, "Huh, what did they have
that I don't?
What is making their article better than mine?"
And you want to take that information
for all the sites that rank above you,
and then you're going to want to modify your content.
And you do this by making yours better than there's.
So if they're doing a handful of things
or discussing a handful of things
that are relevant that you're not,
add those into your article.
update anything that's outdated
to create a better experience in your competition.
You also want to delete anything that's irrelevant.
If something doesn't make sense anymore, delete it.
Like if I had an article on social media
and I was talking about MySpace, I would delete it
because no one cares to hear about MySpace anymore.
But I may add in TikTok
because TikTok is really popular these days.
When you update the article,
I want you to also update the publish by date,
so searching engines know it's updated.
And don't just think about word count,
think about user experience.
It's not about adding 5,000 words extra or 500 words
or even 50 words.
Do what's best for the user,
that could mean you just need to add images
to describe what you're trying to get through
or it could be that you just add a video
or it could be that you're just deleting sections.
You need to do what's best for the user
and not obsess or worry about word count.
And lastly, I recommend that you don't change your URL.
If you want to change your URL, that's fine
but just 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
And once you update it, go back into Search Console,
type in your URL in the search bar at the top,
it'll start fetching the page
and then boom, request it for indexing,
and then you're off into the races
and within 30 days you should start seeing increase
in SEO traffic to that page.
It literally is that simple.
Now, if you need help updating your old content,
you can check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital
or go to NPdigital.com.
Or if you have any questions
and you want to do it yourself, that's great as well,
leave a comment below, we'll answer it,
I'll help you out,
and I'll try to do my best to grow your SEO traffic as well.
If you enjoyed this video, like it, share it
tell other people about it.
And again, if you have any questions
just leave a comment below and I'll answer and help you out.
Thank you for your time.