Blog Strategy: How and Why to Update Old Blog Posts

There are many different ways to set up a marketing and communication strategy and in most cases content is almost always at the center. Many companies focus a lot on content marketing in general with excellent results. In particular, the blog continues to be a very interesting tool.

Managing a company blog is not just about writing

Posts and then letting them slide away into the oblivion of your archive. There is in fact a very important action called “historical optimization” and which consists of updating old articles to generate more traffic, improve the overall quality of your site and optimize positioning on search engines.

As Pamela Vaughan of HubSpot’s marketing team writes, historical optimization has generated and will continue to generate incredible benefits. Her team has managed to:

more than double the number of monthly leads generated from old posts optimized at a later time
Increase the number of monthly organic views of old posts by an average of 106%
Pamela Vaughan and her team have written an ebook entirely dedicated to this topic, which you can download for free here (in English).

What is historical optimization? Blog Strategy: How and Why to Update Old Blog Posts

In simple terms, historical optimization consists of “refreshing” old posts with changes and updates to make them up-to-date and keep them always “alive” in order to increase conversion rate and lead generation, making performance stable over time if not increasing.

Pamela Vaughan says her personal experience with this type of strategy at HubSpot began when, returning from maternity leave, she encountered a new tool released by HubSpot called Attribution Reports , a tool that allows you to better understand how many new leads each blog post directly generates.

Discoveries obtained through Attribution Reports
Once the data from the attribution reports has been analyzed, Pamela’s team is able to extract the following information:

76 % of the blog’s monthly visits came from posts that were at least a month old
92% of the monthly blog leads also came from the same articles
46% of monthly blog leads came from just 30 blog posts
The moment the light bulb went on: optimizing historical posts
Once they had all this information, the team had to figure out how to make the most of it. Of course, you can’t just stop creating new content, which is why there comes a time when you need to change your blogging strategy.

The team reaches two conclusions and they are the key components of the historical optimization project:

understand how to get more leads from high traffic but low converting blog posts.
Once you understood which blog posts were performing best, it was easy to understand which ones were performing the least. This makes it easy to identify those posts that potentially generate a lot of traffic but few conversions and improve them.
understand how to drive more traffic to high-converting blog posts.
On the other hand, Pamela’s team now has data showing blog posts that are performing well in conversion but aren’t generating much traffic month after month. The goal is to SEO-optimize these contents to make them perform better and generate even more traffic for better conversion.
In short, the team understands that it is necessary to not only focus on new content but also try to optimize existing content by studying the data . This is how the historical optimization project was born.

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Why Historical Optimization is More Important Now Than Ever

These days the main problem philippines phone number resource is a real overload of content. Just think that on WordPress alone the global publication of monthly articles has grown so much from October 2006 to reach 58 million bqb directory posts published in a single month in May 2015.

As the importance of content marketing is understood, more and more content is being generated online.

According to Paul Hewerdine of the Earnest agency, the problem is that the demand for content is static while the supply is ever-increasing.

In this context, historical optimization becomes extremely important. It is not just a method to get the best out of the content you already have available, but it is also a way to stay afloat in the face of ever-increasing competition.

Conversion Optimization of Historical Blog Posts Blog Strategy: How and Why to Update Old Blog Posts

The first thing the team did was optimize the conversion rate based on the relevance of the offer. The results of this approach were not always stable: sometimes the result was an improvement in the conversion rate, sometimes it remained unchanged and in other cases it even decreased. This was because the approach in question was purely based on assumptions about what readers and potential customers were looking for.

What was needed was an approach based on data certainty, not assumptions or guesses. The team then wondered if it would be better to focus on the specific keywords that people were using to find these posts. In short, give readers what they were looking for.

The team then got down to business:

testing this strategy on one of the four most visited posts that had ranked very well for the keywords “how to write a press release” and “press release template”.

Using conversion optimization, the conversion rate skyrocketed to +240%: this post now generates 3 times more leads than it did before optimization. All other posts that tested this strategy saw substantial increases in conversion rates.

But how is it done?

How to Optimize Conversion of Historical Posts Based on Keywords
This is a summary that explains how to implement this strategy, to learn more about the topic we recommend you download the free HubSpot ebook on historical optimization , in English.

Step 1: First of all export your blog posts Google Analytics data to understand which are the most visited historical blog posts
Step 2: Identify which keywords each post is being found for the most using a combination of keyword research and keyword tracking tools like this one from HubSpot . Then create a keyword hierarchy, prioritizing the ones that appear to be driving the most traffic.
Step 3: Optimize the conversion of your posts using the keywords you identified in step 2, incorporating those exact keywords (or phrases) into the calls to action of your post or posts.

SEO optimization of historical posts

As we mentioned before, the main goal of SEO optimization of historical posts is to improve the ranking of posts that convert well but do not receive much traffic.

On average, results on the first page of Google get 71% of clicks. Results on pages two and three get only 6%. It is no coincidence that the phrase “the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google” is famous. Furthermore, the first five positions on the first page of Google get 68% of all clicks.