4 Tips to Increase Traffic with Older Blog Posts

You publish a new blog post, promote it on social media, and watch your page views go up for a few days. Then the page views start to decrease, and you move onto the next post on your content calendar. What’s wrong with this picture?

You’re not getting as much out of your blog posts as you could be.

If you’re taking the time to write and promote blog posts, you should maximize their value—and that means looking for ways to drive traffic to high-quality older content. Not sure where to start? Check out our four tips for getting the most out of your existing resources.

Spruce Up Your Evergreen Content

When reviewing your past posts, look for your evergreen content. These are the pieces that aren’t tied to current events or frequently-changing technology—the posts that remain relevant to your audience month over month (possibly with a few minor updates). If the post is mostly evergreen but has some outdated elements, remove or change those parts to make the content relevant again.

That’s exactly what Michael Holeman, one of the PPC analysts at Leverage, did with the blog post ‘4 Ways to Track Conversion When Your URL Doesn’t Change’.  Michael noticed that the blog was consistently getting a lot of hits, even though it had been published over two years ago and included some out-of-date information. In March of this year, he reworked the post to cover Universal Analytics rather than Classic Analytics and changed the sample code snippets mentioned in the post based on updates Google had made. Since then, that blog has been one of our most informative and top-performing posts every month.

Updating the post didn’t take long, but the payoff has been significant in terms of driving more traffic to our blog.

Add Images

Breathe new life into old posts by updating them with relevant images. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without, and adding images can help you get more traction if you recirculate your posts on social media (more on that in the next section). To make your images especially social media-friendly, try superimposing the name of your post over a colorful image, as pictured below:

You can do this using a free tool like Canva; it doesn’t take long, and it will allow viewers to quickly identify the subject of your post on sites like Pinterest where images are more prominent than headlines.

One quick caveat: make sure you’re using royalty-free images so that you don’t run afoul of copyright law. Try a free stock image site like Pixabay or Morguefile, or spring for a subscription to a stock photo site like Dreamstime.

Recirculate Posts on Social Media

Try re-sharing posts on your social media channels, even if you’ve shared them already. Recirculating an old post can lead to more engagement than you might think: some marketers see as much as 75% of the engagement of their original share when they share their posts on a site like Twitter for the second time.

Rather than just randomly re-sharing old posts on social media, look for opportunities to promote the posts when they’re most relevant. For example, if you wrote a post last year with Black Friday tips for ecommerce businesses, promote the post in the lead-up to Black Friday this year.  

Write a Response to an Older Post

Has your perspective on any of your older posts changed? Are there new resources available that enhance your understanding of the subject? If so, consider writing a new piece that engages with and links to the original post. On a similar note, if you’re writing a new post that references something you talked about in an older post, you can include a link to the original post in the body. Get familiar with your blog archives so that you can identify relevant posts to link to whenever you’re working on new content.

Don’t have time to update your blog posts or to produce blog content at all? Contact Leverage Marketing to learn how we can create an effective SEO and content strategy for your company.