The answer to increasing your blog’s traffic is probably something very simple that you already have: old blog posts. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably have , if not thousands, of posts sitting in your archives that are just waiting for to bring them back to life.
If each of your older posts can receive just 10 new visitors per day, that could add up to equal substantial growth for your blog.
And that’s why today I’ll be talking about tips and tricks I’ve recently implemented myself, which have been a tremendous help in getting those old blog posts seen by more people.
How to Increase Blog Traffic with… Old Blog Posts
1. Add Pinterest-friendly images
The best way to gain instant traffic is by Pinterest. But first, you should update your Pinterest-friendly images with your most popular posts of the past.
To do this, I used Google Analytics to find out which posts have been bringing me the most traffic. Then I edited the first 20 old posts from that list in order to include new, Pinterest-friendly images that were consistent with my current colours scheme and fonts.
Finally, I pinned the new images to my Pinterest account. This has absolutely increased my blog’s traffic!
2. Add key words
I cannot stress enough how important keywords are for SEO.
A keyword is essentially the specific topic of your post, or what someone might type into Google to find it. The takeaway here is that your post should mention your keyword several times within your content in order to rank highly in search engines and increase blog traffic.
There’s much more that you can do with keywords to improve your SEO and substantially increase your blog traffic.
3. Add related posts + internal links
If your post is old, it’s likely that you briefly mentioned something that you later wrote an entire post about.
Go through your old posts to see if there are new posts that you can link to!
This is both great for your readers as they can find even more information about a topic they’re interested in within a blog, and is also great for increasing your blog’s traffic, since you’ll increase the number of people clicking around your site.
4. Change old titles to be more SEO-friendly
The title of your post is one of the most important parts of its SEO friendliness, so if you want to rank higher in search engines, it’s important to use titles that include your keywords and sound interesting enough to click.
The best way to rework titles? Try to think of the exact phrases someone would search for in order to find your post and include them in your title.
5. Update & reuse
Did you write a post way back in your beginning days that hardly saw the light of day because, at that time, you had… nobody read your blog?
Well, it’s much easier to update old posts than it is to write entirely new ones, right? So, if you have some winners that don’t get any action, consider spicing them up and republishing them.
6. Lengthen posts & update information
Since we all know that Google loves longer, highly useful posts, go find your some of your best old writings, lengthen them (think about 1,500+ word) and add up-to-date information.
Perhaps you talked about a restaurant that is no longer active or a product that is now outdated. Whatever it may be, seek to add current, useful info to your old content if you want to increase blog traffic.
7. Improve readability
When readers click through to read your old posts, you want to maximise their reading experience with short, easy-to-read paragraphs.
Since blogs and websites do best if paragraphs are broken up into smaller chunks of text, try to keep each paragraph to about 5 – 6 lines, rather than a huge block of 15 sentences clumped together.
Although most of these tips are designed to increase blog traffic by optimising your Pinterest and SEO power, once you improve your older content, there’s so many other ways you can utilise it!
You could share those freshened up posts in newsletters, add them to a section on your sidebar, use a re-worked version as a guest post, turn them into a free e-book for subscribers, and more. The sky is your limit!