7 Boring SEO Tasks You Can Automate to Save One Day Per Week

An SEO expert’s day is filled with a plentitude of activities to rank well on Google, starting with taking care of basic content quality to backlinks, site structure, mobile user experience, and other technical features.

Not to mention having to squeeze the time spent on each task between meetings, conference calls, emails, and urgent projects, which take up a large portion of the week. Before you can even think about finishing less-important SEO tasks, you are already running out of time.

The truth is some tasks are too boring to complete at the end of a tiring day. But you can’t leave it on the table to handle some other day, as it will only overshadow other, more important tasks.

So, what’s the way out?

The good news is advanced online tools can handle your boring SEO tasks, helping you save at least one day per week for creative activities.

Here are some of the boring SEO tasks you can automate now and save yourself from performing these tedious activities.

1. Automate SEO analysis – 2 hours

The complexity of SEO analysis can lead you to paralysis – especially if you are a newbie. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that will help you understand every nook and cranny of a site without wasting time.

For example, the Yoast SEO plugin identifies on-page SEO issues and offers actionable recommendations on how to solve them. It also evaluates how effectively your content is optimized to rank for particular key phrases. If you switch to Yoast SEO premium, then you can leverage its plugin to optimize for keyword synonyms, too.

Here’s the list of SEO analysis activities that you can automate using Yoast:

Image Source: Yoast

2. Automate keyword and backlink monitoring – 30 minutes

When it comes to SEO, monitoring keywords, and checking a website’s backlink profile are the most tedious, time-consuming tasks.

But with a tool like SE Ranking, you can shave off several hours from monitoring activities with the help of a dashboard that collects and organizes everything in one place. SE Ranking’s dashboard helps you monitor backlinks, keyword rankings, and social signals, as well.

Image Source: SE Ranking

3. Automate YouTube SEO optimization – 1 hour

While your plate is full with managing websites and their content, taking care of YouTube SEO can be an extra burden. You can take that burden off your shoulders with a tool like TubeBuddy.

TubeBuddy is a chrome extension that you can download to optimize and promote every video on your YouTube Channel. To put it simply, TubeBuddy finds high-performing topics and helps you craft titles and tags that will gain higher rankings on search engines. Additionally, it also offers A/B testing, thereby allowing you to test, tweak, and increase your YouTube video clicks.

Image Source: TubeBuddy

4. Automate competitor analysis – 1 hour

Performing competitor analysis is a challenging task, as it includes looking into key sources of link-building and lead-generation. Not only does it eat away plenty of time, but it may also ultimately be worthless if you do not try every single strategy.

Fortunately, SEMrush’s “Competitor Analysis” reports allow you to easily obtain the most important traffic data from any industry in any country. It unearths the marketing efforts that your rivals concentrate on the most, discovers their traffic sources, shows you a picture of their targeted audience, and sheds light on their lead-generation sources.

Image Source: SEMrush

5. Automate social sharing – 1 hour

If you are sharing each piece of content as soon as it goes live, then you are unconsciously wasting one hour each day. A much more efficient way to do the job is to automate social sharing with a social media scheduling tool, like Buffer.

Needless to say, Buffer is the most popular social media automation platform that you can use to schedule posts across various social media networks. One of the major features of Buffer is its “Posting Schedule,” which allows you to share content consistently when your audience is most active. That means you don’t have to wait all night and skip dinner for the sake of sharing a blog post on social media.

Image Source: Buffer

6. Automate “Relevant Term” search for your content – 30 minutes

“Write for the user, not the search engines,” is the mantra of SEO. But to really write engaging content, you have to use terms that are relevant to what your target audience wants to know, as well as how Google associates these terms.

For example, maybe you want to rank for “best gym shoes for women.” You follow your research process and select keywords that fit well. But what about other synonyms that users put into Google?

If you search “best gym shoes for women” on Google, then you will notice similar language but with detailed descriptions, like “color,” “lace-up,” “running,” “swift-run,” “training,” “synthetic leather,” etc.

It is these terms that make you stand out from the crowd. Relevant terms are necessary to include in the content. But finding them manually is like looking for a needle in a haystack, thereby resulting in sacrificing hours from your already busy schedule and getting confused with a big list of keywords in Google Sheets.

The solution is to let a tool handle the “relevant term” search, while you focus on including them in your content.

BrightEdge’s DataCube will help you find related terms and topics, as well. It has a program that allows you to enter a keyword and see a list of “related terms” without the need to dig into the depths of Google. You can sort the generated list with a high search volume, long-tail keywords, and keywords of higher value (i.e., scoring 80 or more based on the calculated cost-per-click value and search volume).

Image Source: BrightEdge

7. Automate searching backlink opportunities – 2 hours

Often, experts get so caught up in the site metrics that they can’t decide whether to pursue a particular backlink or not.

However, it is important to know the specific person who runs the site. After all, it’s the site owner who will decide whether or not to link back. So, instead of getting tangled up with site metrics, you have to research backlink prospects. But it’s a lengthy process, started by finding each person, then sending emails, and finally waiting for their response. You don’t even know whether they will respond or not.

That’s why you need the helping hand of BuzzSumo, a backlink prospect, and influencer-finding tool. All you have to do is put your keyword into the search bar, and the tool will display backlink prospects or influencers in your niche. BuzzSumo also shows the response rate of each person, so you can contact the ones with the highest odds of acceptance.

Image Source: Buzzsumo

Conclusion

While none of these tips will single-handedly take your website to the first spot on Google, they will save you at least one day per week, plus give you additional resources to eliminate stress and free up more hours for other creative strategies. Try them out and find the difference in time consumed and time saved.

Guest author: Manisha Sukhyani is a professional freelance writer with 7+ years of experience. She offers writing services to businesses of all size. In leisure time, she loves to write on helping people in solving day-to-day issues. Reach her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The post 7 Boring SEO Tasks You Can Automate to Save One Day Per Week appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/automate-seo-tasks/

10 Link Building Tips and Tricks For Beginners

So, you’ve already created your website. You’re confident that you have the best content in your industry. Yet, as months and years pass, you find that not many people visit your site.

There are too many reasons to list down why your site isn’t receiving enough traffic. But it all falls down to search engines not having enough trust in your site. If they don’t trust your site, you won’t end up in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

One of the ways to end up in the SERPs is to have a reliable website and this is where link building comes in.

To make it short, link building is an SEO tactic of getting backlinks from other sites to your site. If many sites link back to your website, this sends a signal to search engines to trust your website. In the end, you’ll have greater chances to get a higher ranking in the SERPs.

If you’re not practicing link building for your site, you should start now. Learning everything would take a lot of time. That’s why I’ve come up with a list of the basic tricks to building links that you can use as a beginner.

Warning: Not all of these methods will not work immediately. It’s best to study the approaches you choose to apply carefully before acting on them. I’ve noted the learning curve, scalability, and success rate for each method.

1. Finding replaceable links

• Learning curve: 2 hours including tool learning
• Scalability: Low
• Success Rate: 50%

This method is time-consuming and the success rate is not that high. But if you feel that your content is better than others, then you should give it a shot.

For example, let’s say you’ve found a website that has linked to an article that features 10 useful SEO tools. Then, you have an article with a list of 20 tools. Yours is obviously a better article given that your writing skills are also up to par.

The next step is to contact the site and pitch in your offer. Your email may include something like this:

I noticed that you referenced (insert the link you want to replace) in your article. I’ve written a similar article that I believe has better content and would be a better reference to your article.

If the site sees that your article is really much better than the current link they referenced, they’ll most likely replace that link with yours. But again, the success rate isn’t that high especially if you try to hijack a link in a sponsored post.

2. Link building in community sites

• Learning curve: 30 minutes
• Scalability: High
• Success Rate: High

Going to different sites hoping that they’ll backlink to you is not the only link building method you can use. Going directly to your target audience is another way.

Community sites like Quora, Reddit, and other forums are great places to build links. If you see any topics or inquiries in these sites, comment on them and include a link to an article that will be useful for the readers.

There’s also a chance that the people you reach will produce other backlinks for you in other ways such as sharing in social media or in their sites as well.

Note: You must not overdo or spam community sites.

3. Create ego bait content

• Learning curve: 2 hours
• Scalability: Low
• Success Rate: 50%

Ego bait content involves mentioning a site or a specific person positively. Again, the chance of this method working is around 50%, so try not to rely on this too much. Still, it’s a great method for beginners in building links. You can do this in three ways.

1. Create your content first and mention the person/s or site/s.
2. Create your content first without mentioning anyone yet.
3. Think about topic ideas that will feature the person/s or site/s you want to mention.

Use a method that you think will fit you best. If you already have a published article, you can change it into ego bait content and pursue with methods 1 and 2. Method 3 will be similar to guest blogging, but you’ll be publishing the content on your site.

Once you’ve determined which method to use, it’s time to contact the person/s or site/s you mention. Your email to them would include a message like this:

I mentioned you in one of my posts, (insert article link), because I admire your work and services. I’m not looking for something in return. But if you’d like to promote the article or mention my site in one of your posts, it would be such a great help. I’ll truly appreciate it.

High authority sites may ignore this since they would get a lot of emails like this. That’s why you need to gauge the site you’d want to bait.

4. Check for unlinked mentions

• Learning curve: 1 hour
• Scalability: Very Low
• Success Rate: 80%

There are instances where a site will mention you in their content, but it won’t be linking to your site or published post. You can grab this as an opportunity to get a backlink.

The first thing you should do is find those unlinked mentions. You can either go through the dreadful act of manually searching for them or use tools to do this.

Once you’ve found unlinked mentions, your instincts may tell you to contact the site immediately. But it’ll be best to assess the site and the relevance of the unlinked mention. If the site has already mentioned your site or posts with links, then leaving one or two unlinked won’t hurt. If you find the unlinked mention in a published post that’s against your site, it’s best to leave it unlinked.

5. Write up-to-date resources for events

• Learning curve: 2 hours
• Scalability: Low
• Success Rate: 10%

Writing content about events is another way to get a lot of links back to your site. As long as it includes important information about the event that people will want to know, then you will have better chances of getting referred.

You have to be quick in knowing about the different events in your industry. For example, music-related sites can feature concerts of local gigs and technology-related sites can publish content about conferences.

You can then promote this on your social media or contact the event coordinator to inform them that you’ve published content about the event. You can ask the coordinator to reference you as a reliable source about the event.

6. Submit your website and content to directories

• Learning curve: 2 hours
• Scalability: Low
• Success Rate: 50%

Online directories are online catalogs or lists of websites or content. For website directories, they don’t really do much for link building. However, being in a directory will make you more credible and trustworthy.

This could be considered as a long-term investment. You should also consider submitting your website to niche-specific and local directories. There are also some directories looking for specific blog posts.

Remember to not spam directories especially free ones. You must also remember to submit accurate information on your name, physical address, and site statistics. It’s also a good idea to be ready with a description of your website.

But the most important thing to remember is to avoid directories that will require you to add banners or linkbacks to your site. Having these can have negative effects on the SEO score of your website.

Note: This is an old strategy that websites have been using for many years. Still, it’s a relevant method that still works today. Just make sure not to spam these directories especially the free ones since it can lead to an unsuccessful submission.

7. Write tangential content

• Learning curve: 4 hours
• Scalability: Medium
• Success Rate: 15%

Tangential content may be one of the best underdog ideas for link building. As a webmaster, you might think that you only need to create content that’s all about your site. But you shouldn’t be close-minded when it comes to writing content that’s out of the box.

This also doesn’t mean that you need to write about how to train dogs on your mobile technology website. Tangential content is something that’s not completely about your niche, but it’s still somehow related.

Here are some ideas on how to start creating tangential content:

1. Go with a trend. For now, news about the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most searched topics on the web. You can create content around this trend which is still related to your niche. For example, a pet-oriented blog site may write about the effects of COVID-19 to house pets.
2. Write for readers outside your target audience. You can write content that would not only be interesting to your target audience. Here’s an example title, “A Guide to Using Smartphones for Senior Citizens”. Just from this title, you can tell that the content targets senior citizens as well as readers interested in technology who may have elderly family members they want to teach.

What would be the result of creating tangential content? You’ll be able to reach a wider audience. People who can’t relate to your specific niche may be able to understand and connect to the tangential content you produce. Also, there’s a big chance that other sites outside your industry will link back to your content if it’s related to their niche.

8. Repurpose content

• Learning curve: 8 hours
• Scalability: High
• Success Rate: Medium/Low (depends on the niche)

If you have content that you think is great that’s not reaching enough people, you can repurpose it. The process involves creating new content from your existing content.

Here are different ways to repurpose content:

1. Create videos, presentations, infographics, instructographics, and ebooks.
2. Host webinars or create podcasts.
3. Write new content from your published videos or listicle articles.

For example, you’ve published a post on troubleshooting a computer-related problem, you can create a video of it. Another example is repurposing an in-depth article about technology. You can create slideshows from this article and repurpose it for a webinar.

The learning process may take a bit longer than the other methods on this list since you may need to learn new skills. These may include basic graphic arts and video editing.

Investing your time to repurpose content is beneficial since you’ll be able to reach more people and you’ll be learning new skills for your personal development.

Now, where does repurposing content fit in the process of link building? Once you’ve created your repurposed content, publish it on websites like Pinterest, YouTube, and Slideshare. Add your links to the descriptions or wherever they will be visible.

9. Broken link building

• Learning curve: 3 hours
• Scalability: Low
• Success Rate: 60%

In broken link building, you’ll be replacing dead links or links that redirect to 404 error pages in your target sites with working links. This method works well because it actually helps other sites.

Having broken links will hurt a site’s ranking because search engines hate them. You’ll be doing other webmasters favors by pointing out that they have a broken link and replacing it with a live link.

You can use tools such as the Chrome extension, Broken Link Checker. You can find broken links on a webpage much easier using tools like this. This is also helpful especially when a page has too many links. Another good tip would be going for sites and pages that have a lot of links. More links will have a greater chance of finding broken links. You should also look at broken links to your site.

Once you’ve found those links, you can now contact the right person from the site. The best approach would be as someone who wants to help them more than a person who’s only after a backlink. Your email may include something like this:

I found a broken link in your blog, (insert link to the page with the broken link). Luckily, I have a published post that could be a replacement for that: (insert your link)

Hope I was able to help you out.

10. Guest blogging

• Learning curve: 4 hours
• Scalability: Medium
• Success Rate: 40%

The process of guest blogging would start with outreach. There are two easy ways to do this.

1. Use an email outreach tool to contact other sites saying that you want to guest post for them. This is often used as some sites don’t have guest blog opportunities posted on their site.
2. Look for sites that are already accepting guests posts through their website. Most of them would already have complete details on their guidelines. They’ll also have details on their site on how you can submit guest blogs.

Once your target site has accepted your proposal to write a guest blog for them, you’ll need to determine how you can get a backlink to your site. Can you include it in the article? Will they feature your author biography with the link to your site? These are questions that you need to know before they publish your article.

In many cases, sites will have a dedicated page that informs people that they’re accepting guest blogs/posts. Check their guidelines carefully to know what they can offer you.

Is link building worth it?

Though link building takes a lot of time to fully understand and carry out, it’s worth it. Once you’ve established your site’s authority score, you’ll be surprised to see that other sites will be linking out to your site without you needing to reach out to them.

If you’re too busy to pursue link building for your site or don’t have a team for it yet, you can always hire link builders to do it for you.

More info on different link building services and link building techniques can always help you. Of course, this path would cost money. Unless you already have enough budget for this option, you’d probably want to go through link building by yourself first.

Guest author: Daniel Martin loves building winning content teams. Over the past few years, he has built high-performance teams that have produced engaging content enjoyed by millions of users. After working in the Aviation industry for 9 years, today, Dani applies his international team-building experience in linkdoctor.io in solving his client’s problems. Dani also enjoys photography and playing the carrom board.

The post 10 Link Building Tips and Tricks For Beginners appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/link-building-tips/

How to Skyrocket Sales With AI-Powered Email Marketing Campaigns

Businesses these days, however small or big, run on data-driven digital marketing. This leads us directly to one of its most popular and effective forms known as ‘email marketing’. And it has seen huge growth over the years. 

Research shows a whopping 91% of email users as active users that interact regularly. And the number of these exchanges are expected to increase in the coming years. 

So what’s the next big step? Marketers are now in fact starting to utilize the growth by optimizing this channel with artificial intelligence or AI. This begs the question, what exactly is AI-Powered email marketing and how does it aid in sales?

Through this blog, I will look further into the workings of artificial intelligence (AI). How it connects with email marketing and how AI campaigns bring about changes in customer interaction, deliverance, and sales.  

Here’s what to know about AI-powered email marketing 

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) covers a lot of technologies that help machines perform specific cognitive tasks. These technologies now have serious influence and impact on marketing careers and performance.

AI technology is much more than just automation. It analyzes large datasets but it doesn’t just crunch numbers. Through advanced techniques and computational firepower, they take out insights from the data which are then used to predict, recommend, and decide.

This very technique is established in AI-powered email marketing as an extra boost for your email strategy. Hence, it yields more favorable results. For instance, take a look at this survey recently conducted by Statista.

It reveals AI-powered campaigns have had a 41.29 percent improvement rate on revenue alone. Much of this success is met by the number of AI-powered tools made available by several brands to:

• Write email subject lines
• Optimize send times
• Clean email lists
• Create automatic email newsletters and more

This marketing automation aids in garnering a higher conversion rate including personalization and data analysis. This makes AI a much-needed element for upgrading email marketing tactics.

How AI email campaigns increase sales

Here are some of the ways AI is improving email marketing and skyrocketing sales:

1. Engaging subscribers 

A study conducted by the state of email engagement found that about 62% of retailers believe AI utilization to have a huge impact on subscriber engagement. Particularly, B2B companies can monitor subscriber interactions and engage closely with the use of AI.  

It further engages through optimized subject lines. AI tools are used to implement NLG or natural language generation to write improved subject lines more efficiently than humans. This optimization is achieved by learning your brand voice and personality through the data you use. As a result, it directly affects your user experience for the better.

About 47% of users will open an email according to the way the subject sounds. Thankfully, as AI is more efficient in curating customized subject lines, it has higher chances to grab the user’s attention. This then leads to improved click rates and customer conversion. 

2. Personalization

Personalizing your emails is a clever way of acknowledging the different behaviors and interests of your subscribers. A survey reveals that personalized email subject lines have 26% more chances to be opened while delivering 6x higher transaction rates.

This is why personalization is crucial in email marketing. AI enables you to send tailor-made content to your subscribers by determining the right time and frequency through historical data inspection. 

For example, marketers through the use of AI can suggest and recommend products specific to a customer’s likes and insert them into personal email communication.

Personalized emails can have a massive impact on boosting sales. They even result in open and click rate improvement.

Let’s take, for instance, the brand Cosabella. They used this very tactic of AI-powered email personalization to boost their sales without advertising discounts for their products. Through the AI platform ‘Emarsys’, it enabled them to increase email open rates by 4% and overall email revenue by 60%.

The brand also recorded a sales increase of 40 to 60% in comparison to the previous year. Courtney Connell, the marketing director of Cosabella explains how the new system enabled them to leverage data with great merchandising capabilities.  

3. Increase in revenue and decrease in costs

As AI-powered tools help in the increase of open and click-through rates, it influences the revenue from email as well. Hence, better results are produced through email marketing campaigns. 

A case study into the travel company Virgin Holidays reveals a huge spike in revenue after adopting the AI tool ‘Phrasee’ to write automated email subject lines. Virgin Holidays knew AI could write more efficiently but doubted the deliverance of the brand’s fun and quirky tone.

The doubts were soon lifted after Virgin Holidays had an increase of 2% open rate. A bump that would be worth millions in new revenue. Saul Lopes, the CX, CRM, and Loyalty Lead of the company praised the tool for generating several million in revenue for the company. 

We can see how AI-powered email marketing strategies have a strong influence over revenue. But it doesn’t stop there. Since, AI-powered tools make email marketing campaigns faster, easier, and better, they cut down costs for your company by reducing time spent on marketing initiatives.

4. Remarketing

If you think a customer will purchase on the first visit, you are wrong! Research shows only about 2% of users engage in purchasing the first time around. This is where AI comes into the picture. AI is capable of pinpointing when and whom to pitch an email.

Since customers often leave items in a cart without purchasing, AI tools can notify you and pitch an email directed to the customer about the items. This encourages customers to revisit and finish off the deal. 

The advantage with AI is, you can identify unnoticed patterns or details and use it for improved performance. But you need to understand your audience and use the right tools. As such, here are some vendors that provide AI tool services for email marketing:

• Seventh sense
• Rasa.io
• Drift email
• Phrasee

Final remarks

AI is a useful technology and knowing its limits with the right usage will lead your marketing strategies in the right direction. Overall, AI-backed marketing carries a lot of potential to enhance not only email marketing but other online strategies as well. 

Ultimately, AI does set a promising path for future growth. But given its fast influence in a growing capitalist economy, do you think AI is used excessively by marketers? There are a lot of discussions going around on this. Let us know what your opinion is!

Guest author: Kristin Mortis is a Marketing Manager with 7+ years of experience at TDInsights based out of Plano, Texas. She helps businesses deliver the strongest marketing turnaround with cutting-edge digital strategies and tools. She writes about Marketing, big data, enterprise mobility, artificial intelligence, and other technological innovations.

The post How to Skyrocket Sales With AI-Powered Email Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/ai-email-marketing/

How to Update Your Old Blog Posts and Boost SEO

While most websites focus on publishing new content to lure their audience, the truth is, you can generate more results by updating content that is already present on your website.

If you have been posting blogs for a long time, chances are, you have a backlog of old posts that haven’t been updated in the last 2-3 years since you published them. But while you have completely forgotten about those old posts, your target audience is still discovering those pages through Google search or other referral sources.

When new readers land on your website and go through an old post with outdated, stale, or that has information that isn’t relevant anymore, it can increase your bounce rate, affect your rankings, and invariably sabotage your content marketing strategy.

In this article, I’ll discuss why you should update old posts and what is the best way to do it.

Why update old blog posts anyway?

The content on your website represents your brand. By improving and optimizing the existing content on your website, you can provide more valuable information to users and increase search engine discoverability. 

Moreover, updating some of your older, but high-performing posts can extend the life of the content and give your website traffic a big boost as well. If you have noticed some of your evergreen blog posts that were previously getting consistent organic traffic are now falling in search engine rankings, they might have been taken over by newer and updated posts.

The Google May 2020 Core Update is also favoring websites that readily update old content.

Finally, it is also quicker and easier to update an old post as compared to writing a whole new one from scratch. Though you should still be publishing new and original content, updating important old posts can help you save time while still maintaining a consistent publishing frequency.

How do you select which posts to update?

The first thing that you should do is shortlist all the posts that need to be immediately updated and create a content strategy for the same. While there are many ways to go about it, just ensure you design a content strategy that you will actually use.

The main pages that you should update on your website, include:

Pages with high-quality links

Look for posts that have solid, high-quality backlinks from other authority websites, but haven’t been able to rank well in search results. To update these posts, all you would need to do is add the important keywords in your post to see an increase in page views.

Pages which drive a lot of traffic

Updating and refreshing pages that already receive the most traffic on your website is the easiest way to see a spike in website traffic. To find out the most popular pages on your website, go to Google Analytics. On the left pane, select Behavior → Site Content → All Pages. You can choose the time duration as 12 months or more to see the list of pages that get the most views.

Pages with maximum keyword impressions but low rankings

Updating old posts only gives you better rankings and traffic when you target the content in the right way. And for that to happen, you need to know the exact keywords you want to target.

Go to Google Search Console to look for keyword queries that have a lot of impressions but considerably low rankings and click-through rates (CTR). Focus on keywords where your website pages are ranking in the 6-20 position. Find exactly which pages are showing up for those keywords – those are the pages you should update

Pages that have seen a sudden loss in organic traffic

Analyze traffic for your most popular pages on the website for the last 12 months to identify posts that might have suddenly lost organic traffic. The reason behind sudden and sharp drops can be different for different posts.

You can use the Google Analytics dashboard to find posts that are losing traffic and then look into Search Console to find out if those pages have recently lost rankings for important keywords.

Best practices for updating and republishing old blog posts

1. Keep the same URL

Instead of publishing the updated post as a new article, which can result in search engines thinking your post has duplicate content in it, just modify the original post and keep the URL exactly the same. You can write the updated post in a separate document and copy/paste it over the original post to republish it.

2. Target new keywords

Your already published post might be ranking for some keywords that you never expected. Find those keywords and place them strategically in your content to get better keyword rankings. It’s best to pick keywords that have considerably low search volumes because they will be a lot easier to rank.

3. Update content for accuracy

You shouldn’t just update content for the sake of updating it. Instead, focus on blog posts that have become outdated or have stale information in them. When updating posts, evaluate all the content for accuracy in determining the sections that need to be removed, changed, or added.

A good practice is to see how other websites are tackling the same topic and how you can do it better. You can monitor content by keywords, topics, and sources by using a discovery tool like Content Studio. You can analyze the top pages which are receiving the most engagement.

You should also make sure to check the popular keyword tags and average word count of the posts for the selected keyword or topic to update your old blog posts accordingly for maximum engagement.

Shortlist the top web pages and analyze them carefully to understand why they are so popular and make changes to your existing posts accordingly.

4. Add internal links to new content

If you are updating an old blog post that was initially published over two years ago, it might only have internal backlinks to content that was published way before the post itself. While freshening up your post, you can use this opportunity to add internal links to recently published content to boost the SEO performance of your website.

5. Search for any broken links

While adding new links, you should also check for any broken or incorrect links in the content. All the links in your article should be accurate and lead your readers to the right place. Broken links don’t just dampen the user experience, but they are also a red flag for search engines. You can use a broken link checker like Ahrefs to quickly find any incorrect links on your website.

6. Add new videos or images

One of the best ways to freshen up an old article is by adding new media to it. You can add new screenshots or even videos that are related to the topic or the keyword of the blog.

In fact, by adding videos to blog posts, you can increase the amount of time users stay on your website, which will directly help boost the website’s SEO. You could create a video version of one of your high performing posts and upload it on the website for higher engagement.

7. Include an editor’s note for transparency

Whenever you edit an existing blog post, make sure to add a small editor’s note at the end just for the sake of transparency. This will especially be helpful for popular posts on your website that already get a lot of comments and views. Your readers might get confused about seeing the new information and an old date on the post. In the note, you can add the date and reason for the changes.

Final words

When updating old posts for SEO, you have to make sure that the post is optimized for the keywords you are trying to target. Otherwise, you might not be able to see any visible results.

That is why you must conduct a keyword audit to find the right keywords that should be included in every post and then create a blog republishing strategy accordingly.

Guest author: Vikas Agrawal is a start-up Investor & co-founder of the Infographic design agency Infobrandz that offers creative and premium visual content solutions to medium to large companies. Content created by Infobrandz are loved, shared & can be found all over the internet on high authority platforms like HuffingtonPost, Businessinsider, Forbes , Tech.co & EliteDaily. 

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