Hey, what’s up everybody, Brian Dean here. In this video, I’m going to show you a strategy that has been working extremely well for me over the last few months. In fact, as you can see in this Google Analytics chart, over the last six months or so, organic traffic to Backlinko has increased by 31 and a half percent. This isn’t one of those cases where it’s like 31% takes someone from a hundred visitors a month to 130, right. The raw numbers are also really high.
This is almost 200,000 extra people over the last six months. As you can see, it’s actually been increasing more in January. So, we have 60% more traffic compared to July and published the same amount of stuff, doing all the same stuff. The big difference has been that we’re going back and updating old power pages and improving old power pages.
In this video, I want to show you a few different ways to do it and some lessons I’ve learned from this exact process and how you can get the most out of this process. So, let’s take a step back. A couple years ago, I read this post on HubSpot, which is about how they recommend going back and updating old blog content and I was kind of doing that.
I’d go back and if there was a broken link, I would fix it or a screenshot that was out of date, I would change it, but I didn’t put a lot of effort into going back and updating old stuff. For the most part, I was focused on the next piece of content or the next strategy or whatever, like most people.
But when I read this post, it really struck a nerve because they actually showed the data behind how it worked for them and you can see that the red lights here indicate organic traffic after they updated content and the blue is before.
As you can see, 100% of these six increased some significantly after they made an update. So, I was like hm, this is pretty cool. So, I actually tested this, had some success and I called it the content relaunch and it actually published a trademark technique power page about this strategy, which is where you go back, you update an old piece of content, you improve it and then you relaunch it like a brand new piece of content. This still works well.
This is something that I still do, but I realize there’s different ways to do this. There’s more dimensions to it and you can get more out of it than what I discovered here in this 2016 case study. So, yeah. If you haven’t read this case study, I recommend giving it a read. It gives some background on how this works, but the gist is basically you back to old content, you improve it, update it, expand it in some cases and then you repost it like a new blog post. For example, in 2018, I took this post about SEO copywriting and I updated it and relaunched it like a brand new post.
It got a nice spike in traffic in terms of direct traffic ‘cause it was “new” but also in organic traffic. The problem was that because I didn’t really do much in terms of updating and upgrading, the traffic ended up going back to almost where it was before. So, it was a good temporary boost but I wanted something more long-term. So, I started going back to content that didn’t just need an update but an overhaul.
One of the first pieces of content that I updated this year was this one here, which is called “The 9-Step SEO Strategy for 2019.” On this URL before, there was another piece of content that was completely different. It was a case study. So, I’ll show you the difference between the two pieces of content to give you an idea of how much I changed this one. So, this was the old one you can see on archive.org and it was basically a case study of how I used one strategy called guestographics and some case studies from other people and all this stuff. It did well when it came out.
People really liked it. It got a lot of shares and comments but it didn’t do well on Google and one of the reasons is for people searching for SEO strategies or SEO strategy or other related keywords, I didn’t really give them what they wanted, right. If you were searching for SEO strategy, you probably don’t want a case study. You want a strategy that you can follow that’s not just one tactic, basically.
So, I went back and I took this from a case study and I turned it into something a little more general like something that someone searching for SEO strategy would want to see and completely overhauled the content. It doesn’t really resemble the old one at all.
Also, you’ll notice that all the screenshots are much more up-to-date. Everything’s just more up-to-date. So, that was a big part of why it turned around and I’m going to show you the Google Analytics data behind how much the traffic improved. Kind of insane, 7,000 percent. It’s kind of a wacky amount. Now, one thing to keep in mind about this number is that a lot of it’s because when I republished it, it gets a spike when it first comes out just like the SEO copyrighting post that I showed you earlier.
The difference here is that you can see that the boost maintains and it’s a lot more traffic. The chart actually doesn’t show how much but if you look at the numbers compared to... Well, that’s Christmas, so a little misleading. So, let’s go to not a holiday. January 19th compared to the 20th, 69 visitors versus four. How about these two? February 6th versus January 7th, 126 as opposed to six.
There are some days in here like on New Years Eve and even where I was getting zero visitors to this page. It just wasn’t performing, but when I updated it and relaunched it like a new post, the traffic... I got the spike but it maintained because it’s a good fit and that’s one of the reasons that it went from fifth page or whatever for my target keyword to number three. So, that’s one way to do it.
So, if you are going to do relaunches or updates, I recommend taking these pages and looking at it from this perspective. What would someone searching for the keyword want to see? A lot of people call this searcher intent or user intent, whatever fancy words you want to use. Basically, you want to put something out there that satisfies user intent because Google can measure that stuff and now that my content fits, it’s stuck here for a long... It’s about a month later, it’s still...
More than a month later, it’s still in the number three spot. So, it gets that temporary boost but it actually stuck this time as opposed to some of my other stuff. Now, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to completely overhaul your content. It’s already good to begin with. It fits user intent and that’s what I did here. So, this is called The Ultimate SEO Site Audit. I published this about seven months ago and you know what, the content is still relevant. It still matches user intent.
There wasn’t too much to change here. So, what I did was I just went in and I updated the content a little bit. I changed some wordings. I added some internal links, added some external links, changed some screenshots. I didn’t update that much. Just kind of tried to make it more up to date and I didn’t relaunch it as a new post. I didn’t sent out an email to the email list.
I didn’t tweet it out. I didn’t share it. I just kind of quietly updated and changed the published date in WordPress and we have something at Backlinko, we use “Last updated.” You can do whatever you want, but basically using this, it doesn’t go over the top of the blog feed. It stays where it was, but Google can see that there has been a major update. A couple things I want to point out about doing this, you definitely want to make the updates as significant as possible.
Like I said, you don’t really need to overhaul it necessarily unless it’s just not a good fit or just it’s completely out-of-date like my SEO strategy, the old one. It really just needed to be completely broken down from scratch and start over, but this one was really good to start with. So, all I did is just update it and improve some things. It’s funny. When you write something and then you publish it and you go back months later, you see a lot of things that could be improved in the content in terms of copy, in terms of how something’s described, in terms of steps. If you’re in the tech industry at all, stuff changes constantly.
Tools and screenshots and... Things just change all the time. So, it’s a great opportunity to go in and improve your stuff. One of the cool things about it is not only do you get the improvement in traffic but you’ll notice that... Look at the bounce rate and average session duration compared to before. So, this is like a month versus the previous month. You can see that traffic increase isn’t as big as with the SEO strategy post and that’s for the simple reason that it wasn’t that big of a difference.
It already satisfied user intent pretty well, but you’ll notice that these user experience metrics are much better than the old post just by updating it a little bit because land on the post. Now that it’s 2019 at the time of recording this, they land on this and they’re like perfect, this is updated. Boom, not 2019. 2019. They see all this updated stuff. There’s nothing that looks like this is out of date, so they stick around and those numbers are better and it’s one of the reasons that traffic has consistently improved, although not as much.
So, this is working so well that I made this a focus for a team this year. So, we have a Google doc that I recommend you setting up something similar. Basically, what we do is we list out all the content on the site that could possibly go out of date, which is basically every post and we go through them and check to see what could be updated. We try to update as much as possible.
Like I said, if you’re going to change the date to show last updated or a new publish date, you don’t want to just change one word and do that because it’s kind of shady and Google might crack down on that someday. So, just to be on the safe side, I go through and make as extensive updates as I can. Sometimes it’s a complete overhaul. Sometimes it’s updating five to 10% of the post at most, but at the end of the day, if possible, you want to update as much as you can and change as much as you can.
You can see that we have a whole list of posts. So, this way, when you have this doc, every year, you’re, at least once a year, going through and making sure your stuff is up to date. This is just good practice for if you have a blog and you want your blog to be seen as an authority. It’s just good practice that people land in your blog, they see that everything’s up to date, everything’s for the current year, there aren’t any out-of-date screenshots or references or broken links.
That’s also, as you see, really good for SEO. As we’ve accumulated and started updating everything, I’ve noticed a compound effect and one of the reasons that you can see that traffic’s starting to increase from these updates, but when we really amped it up in January, traffic is up 60%. Of course, we publish stuff and blah blah blah. I don’t know exactly. This is compared to July, so I don’t know if we didn’t that much in July or didn’t do as well, but either way.
I mean, this is 60,000 more unique visitors just from Google. This doesn’t even count social and other people sharing it and whatnot. So, the bottom line here is I highly recommend once you get some power pages under your belt, setting up a system where at least once a year, you go through and updating that.
Basically, the system you want to do is you look at each post and you say, “Is this good as it is or does it need a major overhaul?” And you usually kind of know if it’s performing or not. If it’s not, it might be time for a complete overhaul. If so, put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for a target keyword and create something that’s going to match that.
If it’s already good and it’s already performing pretty well and you think it’s a good match for user intent, that’s where you want to go and just update it and changed the updated date and maybe add some references to the current year in the
copy like in the title tag so people really know that it’s updated for this year.
copy like in the title tag so people really know that it’s updated for this year.
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