We know how to increase blog traffic without creating something brand new. You should note that it all depends on the situation, and blogging photography may need a change in descriptions, not images. When it comes to articles, here it’s possible to apply different strategies for an effective blog update. Let’s move on to discover ground-breaking blogging tips.

Why You Need to Update Old Blog Posts?

Optimizing your blog for SEO is a crucial reason for webmasters to resort to renewing their previous posts. You know that blogging takes a lot of time and effort and every time, creating new content is inefficient. 

It is reported that old posts help to receive more traffic rather than new ones. So if you aim to make money by blogging, pay attention to tips for content updates. You will benefit from increased conversion rates, boost traffic, enhance user experience, and save your resources. 

How to Choose Posts for Update?

With a lot of posts in your blog, it may be challenging to choose the ones that urgently need renewal. You should keep a list of these posts organized to regularly update your content. Firstly, pay attention to the posts that attracted more traffic earlier. This data is available in Google Analytics, where you can also see posts losing rankings. Besides, old posts with powerful backlinks would also be good for renewal. 

5 Tips on How to Update Blog Posts 

Here we prepared effective blogging tips to increase your traffic and ranking. 

#1 Update Images and Image SEO

Visuals are integral elements of a successful post, so creative visual content can bring you incredible results. Poorly edited images make your blog unprofessional, and people will not pay attention to text if it is complemented with unattractive visuals. 

If you are into blogging photography, add several new photos and formulate interesting descriptions to boost traffic. In other cases, you can use stock photography to choose attractive images for updating old posts. 

Pay attention to a featured image that people see first before reading the text. The more interesting images you have that correspond to the post theme, the more time people will spend on your site. As a result, your post ranking boosts. 

#2 Update Keywords

Professional SEO services can help you improve your online presence in many different ways, and keywords are one of the most effective. Right keywords ensure you a higher ranking and increased traffic. 

Find words and phrases the audience uses the most often to search specific content and build your strategy based on their preferences. It’s possible to make keywords and phrases manually, but there are more reasonable options. 

You can resort to special tools offering keyword generation. Apply new keywords in additional sections without destroying the already made structure with old keywords. Do not forget to add them to your meta description and titles for better results. 

#3 Check Backlinks 

The backlink building plays a crucial role in blog success as it provides visitors with relevant information on the topic. You need to add fresh links to your posts and make sure old ones work well. 

It’s an excellent way to increase the time users spend on your site if there are many powerful backlinks. By applying internal and external links, Google will see that your content is still relevant and show it higher in the list of search results. 

Consider that internal links are an efficient tool for attracting people to read more of your blog posts. Insert them naturally, so that blog readers get redirected without even noticing as their curiosity moves them forward. 

#4 Create and Leverage Media Content 

Useful, informative posts will always attract many visitors, and an explainer video is the best way to achieve this. You can refresh your content by adding this video made with the help of capturing the screen. 

There are many tools you can use depending on your operating system, such as a screen recorder for Windows or a recording tool for Mac. Keep in mind that recording licensed content and posting it on your blog is forbidden. 

Another creative solution to leverage content is to make podcasts and videos to share on social media. It’ll help to engage a larger audience and make them visit your blog. Show people an interesting part of information and encourage them to read the post to find more.  

#5 Refresh Titles

A title is the first thing a person sees in search engine results. It should be catchy and fully convey the message you reveal in the post. If you have questionable content, do not hide it from readers behind attractive descriptions and titles. You will find your audience when being honest about what you share with the world and why it’s worth exploring.

Your titles must contain keywords or synonyms to subtitles in your post. Having a strong blog and post title leads to increased organic search and ranking. Update inefficient titles to stand out and make people visit your page.

Conclusion

Now you know plenty of creative solutions for old blog content updates. Apply methods you like the most to the questionable posts and benefit from blog success. It will increase your website ranking as people will more often see your posts in search engine results and visit your website. Thus, act if you want to promote your blog and believe in what you do to attract the audience.

The post 5 Ways To Update Your Old Blog Posts To Increase Traffic appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Modern web crawlers used by most search engines index your whole resource, rather than its most recent pages. In simple words, a ton of foul fish lying in your cellar for years will definitely make your living room on the ground floor smell funny, especially if you have completely forgotten about it. Below, we discuss 5 alarming signs that may suggest that your old website pages require an update. If you encounter some of these indicators, chances are it is time for a major clean-up.

1. Your Freshness Score Is Too Low

Search engines use crawlers to continuously reappraise your website quality and adjust its position in search outputs. Content ‘freshness’ is one of the most critical characteristics, since sites that have not been updated for many months are less likely to possess up-to-date and accurate information sought by most users. If your SEO specialist says that your PageRank score on Google has lowered substantially, this is a clear sign that your materials need an update. While publishing new articles can require a lot of effort on your part, revising your old publications usually takes up less time. Hence, this is a great way to quickly boost your ‘freshness score’ without breaking the bank.

Additionally, regular updates actually increase the ‘interest’ of Google crawlers checking all of your materials every time and increasing their PageRank results. This means that the piecemeal approach of devoting 15 minutes per day to revising your old content is actually more powerful than the constantly delayed intention to change everything in one sitting. Start small and watch for improvements as you proceed to identify the optimal balance in terms of revision scope and SEO results.

2. The Keywords Are Inconsistent

When you are just starting out, you probably want to just publish interesting content. You view every new article or page as the next major step in your website creation, rather than a small element of a long-term development strategy. While this approach is fine during the initial phase, there comes a moment when you simply do not understand why you are not attracting the traffic you want despite your best efforts. Keywords are one of the reasons your resource may not be ranked in the desired categories in search outputs or get lower Google rankings. This is the moment you need to use some specialized SEO tools to explore the keyword focus of all website materials. 

Imagine that you used to write about PC hardware and computer assembly tips several years ago. However, your recent materials are focused on video editing and audio production for Mac users. In this scenario, it is highly probable that some of the older pages may be producing different keywords than your newer ones. To avoid these problems, you may need to re-write your past articles and posts in order to link them with your new focus. Try changing some of these materials to see if you start getting more quality traffic in your desired search category.

3. New Visitors Are Dissatisfied

So, a popular YouTube blogger or a renowned industry expert has recently mentioned in their interview that they find your website materials extremely helpful in their line of work. Such sincere recommendations are called ‘earned media’ in e-marketing and are considered some of the best ways to promote your resource. With great traffic comes great responsibility, as thousands of new visitors will critically appraise your website. Many of them can leave dissatisfied if they find its contents outdated, its articles full of spelling mistakes, and its URL links broken. This scenario may be especially problematic if the original referral guided them to some older materials, rather than the recently published ones. If you get mostly negative reviews or direct messages from new visitors, it is clearly time for an update.

Some of the popular problems with old website pages include the lack of modern presentation instruments and limited mobile-friendliness. Have you considered recording audio podcasts for some older articles to let people listen to them while on the move? How about putting some infographics right under the page heading to instantly demonstrate the key findings of the article? You need to keep in mind that new visitors can start browsing your website from any page or choose to read all materials from the earliest date, especially if you publish some connected materials progressing in a longitudinal manner.

4. The Bounce Rates Are Higher for Old Pages

Bounce rate is a simple Google Analytics metric reflecting the share of people leaving your website after visiting a single page on it. If this problem affects both old and new posts, this may be a sign of the keyword targeting inefficiencies mentioned earlier. However, higher bounce rates for older website pages is a completely different problem. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are older pages on my website optimized for mobile users reading them from smartphone devices?
• Do they match the loading speed expectations of modern visitors?
• Do these pages contain valuable links to newer pages convincing the users to stay on your resource and continue using it in the future?
• Is the published information still relevant and accurate?

In many cases, adjusting the loading times and links freshness may be sufficient to decrease the bounce rate for your old website pages. If this does not resolve the issue, try updating their content to ensure that it is in line with visitor expectations.

5. Conversion and Engagement Rates Are Too Low

Most websites are focused on engaging their visitors and motivating them to perform some actions, such as:

• Following the company on social media;
• Providing an email for newsletters;
• Purchasing some paid materials;
• Buying paid subscriptions,
• etc.

If older pages produce lower conversion rates than newer ones and have low engagement indicators, this means that they need to be updated or refreshed. Some options in this sphere may include:

• Focusing on engagement rather than information provision;
• Adding motivating phrases to stimulate subscriptions or website e-store purchases;
• Insert links to other website pages in order to link their content with newer materials.

Ideally, all pages of your website should follow the same ‘pull marketing’ plan, starting with interesting and fresh content and convincing your visitors to ask for more. A very popular idea in this field is the provision of some summary tables, short educational courses, or audio recordings of website materials via email upon subscription. If your older pages do not follow a consistent engagement and conversion plan, now is the right time to introduce greater consistency across your platform. Many website owners fail to maintain a coherent focus for all website materials and do not understand what outputs they seek to produce beyond basic advertising income. Revising your old and new posts is a great way to get some valuable insights into this field and better understand why you are running your resource the way you do and what alternative strategies you may pursue. 

While many tactics can be used to address the above-mentioned problems, you need to use them in a consistent manner to minimize unnecessary expenses. To achieve good results, we would recommend applying one instrument at a time and measuring the results with the same set of metrics. If you suggest that the keywords inconsistency may be your core problem, focus on this issue for one month, and observe the differences in traffic, engagement, and other indicators. Try to also introduce changes gradually to realize the effects of small and regular updates mentioned earlier. This way, you can see if the described strategies work for your resource specifically. Keep in mind that the audience of every website is different, and your strategy should be practice-based, rather than copied from industry leaders or competing platforms.

Suggested:

Should You Optimize Your Existing Web Pages?

The post 5 Alarming Signs That Your Old Website Pages Require an Update appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Do you even have any idea how wonderful it is going to bring a significant impact on search engine optimization and its entire landscape? Well, we will get to know that in just a short while, but let us first dive into BERT’s general description, what it is and what does it do?

What Is BERT Exactly?

BERT is basically an algorithm update to properly analyze how words or different prepositions are used in a search query and how they relate to one another. In short, before BERT Google used to do search queries much easier by merely omitting certain words from it, such as “for” and “But.” However, it soon realized that there was a significant difference between a search query “flights from London to New York” and “flights from New York to London.”

Google used to easily provide the same search results by simply ignoring the “from” and “to” from the query. And the results it showed were of no value, mainly due to the massive difference between the search queries, as explained in the example mentioned above. Thus, with the help of this new algorithm update, the search engine aims to give out more accurate results by carefully taking every phrase, word, and syllable into consideration.

Why Is It Important?

Even though Google keeps on making changes in its search engine algorithms every now and then, the introduction of BERT is seen quite impactful. It is developed as an effort by Google to enhance the user’s experience. Now, you see, search engines fail to understand a complicated query fully completely; for this reason, a better understanding of language and its nuances is important. BERT makes this job easier, so when you wonder next time, why it matters? This is one of the main reasons. With the help of BERT, Google aims to increase your search rankings by providing more accurate results and enhanced user experience.

Prepare your Website for Google Bert

If, as a website owner, you are looking for ways to increase your search engine rankings, then it’s always better to start with a strategy. But this doesn’t mean you would have to revamp your search rankings completely, you need to follow four techniques given below to achieve this aim.

1. Incorporate Simple Keywords

One of the most important factors these days for deploying an effective keyword strategy is the use of mixing long-tail keywords of three or more words. Bert tends to prioritize conversational words tightly coupled together, and in this way, it impacts the current trend of your content.

Moreover, BERT follows content that is of high quality and is created naturally. Which means it should be informational. Don’t focus on keyword generation too much; you would want to provide genuine information through your content as well. Bert only prefers content that speaks value. Merely, focusing on your choice of keywords won’t be a smart thing to do in this regard. Hence, put in tireless efforts for creating fresh, crisp, and genuine content and let the keywords you have chosen flow naturally.

2. Long-tail Keywords are the Real Deal

As mentioned earlier, long-tail keywords should be your top-most priority while dealing with BERT. Even though BERT content quality is also a priority, a long-tail keyword is also of some relevance, so don’t ignore them. While content quality is the number-one priority, BERT will give long-tail keywords equal relevance. When Google receives a search query, it knows that users are typically typing it in by not keeping relevant keywords in mind. They are simply in search of directions, advice, and recipes.

Google understands this by focusing on longer queries and by catering to its users. So, for this reason, it would be a smarter thing to incorporate long-tail keywords. For instance, create content that has the title “8 steps to create a vanilla cupcake” instead of “steps to create cupcake.” Searches like these need to be answered. Keeping your audience in mind can also be beneficial. Think from their perspective and what words they utilize to type their query.

Suggested:

How to find long-tail Keywords?

3. Invest in Creating Informational Search Content

Informational searches refer to queries based on broad topics. It includes questions that get searched most on, and many people want answers to them. Moreover, as BERT also understands languages, it makes providing answers to questions based on general information much easier. Hence, it would be better to start off from creating content that is based on information search.

Start creating how-to articles that provide a step-by-step guide or go for writing blogs that provide tips and benefits on specific topics. There are tremendous opportunities for you to create content based on informational search; what matters most is that all the information that goes into the content must be of genuine nature.

4. Make Use of Stop Words

Now, if you don’t know what stop words are, they are the prepositions used in the content which were previously omitted by the search engine. However, now with BERT, Google promises to provide its users with more accurate results. Which means, it would be advantageous for you to put stop words back in your content.

Take Away

This blog illustrates the importance of BERT with some essential techniques which will help your website get back on track and optimize with BERT accordingly. Google is making efforts towards expanding its AI’s capacity to examine the different nuances of language. This means it’s more important for websites to come up with content that speaks quality, value, and authenticity. Hence, read on this blog to understand all different concepts for BERT and level up your website ranking game.

The post How Bert Effects SEO and How Can you Optimize for it? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

With that in mind, here are some of the core principles which you need to apply to your online business in order to protect it from future Google Updates.

Follow the Guidelines

It may seem beyond basic, but the trick to ensuring that the next Google Update doesn’t tank your site is very easy; just follow the rules.

Of course, Google has around two-hundred guiding principles which make up the overall algorithm. Not knowing every tenet of these guidelines off by heart is normal. It doesn’t mean your online business is destined to flop. It’s doubtful even the most skilled SEO ‘guru’ actually knows a handful, let alone all of them. However, if you follow the very basic outlines that Google requires from a site you should see the benefit relatively quickly.

Content is Still Important

‘Content is king’ is one of the most overused phrases in the digital marketing industry. And it has been contested in recent years as people try to establish parameters, guidelines and what have you, beyond buzzwords. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s no longer true.

Long-form, detailed and relevant content is still vitally important to help ensure your online business site ranks well. The higher quality your site content, the more likely you will be able to weather any storm that comes your way during a Core Update.

And, importantly, remember that duplicate content is much worse than bad content. It can get your site penalized. So, no matter how tempting don’t steal–including images–from other sites, as it could reap terrible consequences for your site. If your content is written by an agency or freelancer, then it is your responsibility to ensure they are then not stealing it from other sites. Unfortunately, this can happen and it is imperative you check this is not the case frequently.

Beware of Links

Link building is not dead, despite everyone and their grandmother stuffing SEO-related media with this phrase. However, caution is still needed for this particular marketing practice. As, now more than ever, it is quality over quantity which benefits your online business.

But, as you may or may not know, there have been large consequences for sites following Google Updates in relation to links. Especially following the Penguin Update in 2012; which targeted spammy or irrelevant links in bulk. Since that day SEO has been plagued with the idea that all link building is bad and not just the spammy kind.

Yet, in 2019 link building is still a practice that can be beneficial to your online business. It can still help to build your site, improve your traffic and ultimately help you to grow your long-term revenue. Doing so the right way, however, has become the key to avoiding devastating losses when a Google Update hits. This means ensuring the links built to your site are high quality and hold some form of relevancy. So, if you’re a sports brand building business loan links… well, you get the picture.

If your link building schemes are all above board, then you should have nothing to worry when it comes to Google Updates.

Make Keywords Natural

Once upon a time, webmasters would fill footer of a page with keywords and then simply change the text color to blend into the footer. Making the keyword stuffing completely unobvious to the casual site visitor. This was happening on an industrial level. It was a common ‘SEO expert’ practice.

And then a Google Update named ‘Hummingbird’ launched in 2013.

This meant that keyword stuffing was now heavily penalized. Which affected pages that simply overused the keyword throughout the text, but didn’t necessarily employ the tactic mentioned above. This means that the pages which had previously ranked for these tactics were suddenly tanked. And sites that had been much more conservative with their keyword use were suddenly rewarded for that fact.

Following from this, also, was a growing trend of matching searches to better meet user intent, rather than just the keywords they use, has also become more and more prevalent in Google’s Algorithm. Meaning that a site no longer has to exact-match keywords, rather just a general connection to the topic in some cases. 

For example, you may optimize a page for a keyword like ‘oral hygienist’. A user can then search ‘dental hygienist’ and your page may still appear, as the intent behind the two terms is still very much the same. The same can be done for a number of keywords and industries, using broad keywords along the lines of ‘app developers’. This means, overall, that you have much more room when it comes to keyword optimization – it can be much more natural.

Ultimately, keyword optimization is still as important as ever for SEO. But, to protect your site from past and future algorithm updates, it is vital that all of your optimizations are done in line with Google best practice to protect your online business.

Think Long-Term

Ultimately, choosing to forego short-term ‘easy’ fixes for your site and you should invest in long-term strategies instead. This is ultimately more important to help avoid a Core Update problem at some stage down the line.

The longevity of your search campaigns should really stretch beyond ‘get a good link and your traffic will go up slightly that week’. The long-term strategy needs to look beyond next week and look to how to obtain traffic over longer periods, which can then be converted more consistently over time.

Long-term SEO strategies are where many agencies, freelancers and businesses tend to fall short of the mark. As getting short term traffic increases is often the main aim of many common practices set out in this niche on the whole. Perfecting longer-term, more consistent, growth can then put you above and beyond the strategies of your competitors.

Fundamentals of this long-term strategizing can include:

• Ensuring multiple traffic sources for your site – don’t let organic be the only source of traffic!
• Choose keyword optimization which will survive the test of time – not just keyword choices which are popular in the here and now!
• Build a contingency of loyal site visitors/customers. This way, you can rely on repeat custom as well as new users finding the site.
• Think about setting up paid campaigns. Google Ads is quickly becoming the search giant’s biggest concern, so make sure you are well versed in this method of search.
• Audit your performance regularly to ensure there is nothing which could be improved upon or changed.
• Engage your audience regularly across channels; including competitions, audience polls and other such tactics to ensure good long-term user ‘loyalty’.
• Analyze competitor SEO and replicate these tactics were deemed effective.
• Continue to build links to your site, but ensure they are high-quality and worthwhile.

As you will have noticed, a strong long-term SEO strategy is as much concerned with extending into other platforms as it is strengthening its own. Remember to change and adapt to your market over time as well; as this is of fundamental importance in order to build a sustainable digital marketing plan over time.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, ensuring that your online business is not badly affected by a Google update shouldn’t be too difficult. The fact is that if you are following basic guidelines or rudimentary SEO practice, your site should be able to weather the storm relatively well. Beyond that, issues that arise after an update could very well be due to more technical or in-depth problems than you might be expecting.

Keep the three main threads outlined above in mind when it comes to your online business and your site should be fine.

The post How to Protect Your Online Business from Google Updates? appeared first on Tricky Enough.