Updating old articles can TRIPLE your traffic in just a few minutes…
I like to update mine every 12 months, even for evergreen content.
Here’s my process…
1. Decide which posts to work on first.
- You can just start with the oldest if you want.
- But, if you’re short on time and want the BIGGEST impact right now, then choose the ones that have lost traffic.
2. To find which posts have lost traffic, open Google Search Console.
- Click on Search Results.
- Change the date to compare the last 28 days year over year.
3. Click on PAGES
The fields that you’ll be interested in are Clicks and Position, so use the coloured blocks above the graph to show those.
4. Sort by Clicks Difference to see which pages have lost the most traffic.
- Click the URL of the top page to look at just that one.
- Then, click QUERIES to see which keywords that page has lost.
- Sort by Clicks Difference again.
5. Now, you can see which keywords have lost the most traffic.
Here’s what that looks like…
6. If you look at the top row, you can see that the clicks for that keyword have gone from 746 per month to 14 per month. Eek!
- BUT, the ranking position hasn’t changed!
- Either fewer people are searching for that this year, OR, Google has reduced how many it shows on page 1.
7. To find out which, I’ll paste the keyword into Google trends.
- The data looks pretty flat, so it’s not just fallen out of favour. Good to know.
8. Looking at the Google results, there are only 9 showing on the page now, maybe there were 10 before?
- This keyword could be worth boosting onto page one.
- But first, I have one more thing to check.
9. I want to know how much money this post makes me so I know how much effort to put into working on it.
Let’s see the ad revenue…
10. I can see that although the RPM is quite low at $13.54, it gets a decent number of views so makes about $45 per month.
- It used to get triple this, so it has the potential to make $150 per month with a bit of work.
11. Updating this post so that it pops back onto page 1 could net me $100 per month.
- Over $1000 over a year!
- So it’s worth doing.
12. I’ll work on this post and then repeat the process for the next one.
Let me know if you’d like a step-by-step guide to exactly HOW I update old posts.
