HOW TO INCREASE THE LIFE OF YOUR CONTENT & DRIVE TRAFFIC TO OLD POSTS

How to drive traffic to old posts and increase the life of your content

If like me you blog daily then you’ll know full well that there are two downsides to this frequency of posting, firstly the time it takes, but secondly the shortened life of each piece of content you produce. This isn’t just an issue daily bloggers face but something we all face, we put so much work and effort into creating content for our blog, but sadly the content is soon replaced with new features and delegated to your archive pages.

Fortunately there are a few tricks to improving the life of your content, driving traffic to your old posts which improve your search visibility, and importantly increasing your overall blog traffic as a result, so today I wanted to share 5 super simple ways that you can do this.

5 WAYS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR OLD POSTS & BOOST YOUR TRAFFIC

Create evergreen content

Firstly when it comes to the sort of content your creating, why not try creating more ‘evergren’ content, this type of content is not really seasonal nor topical, it’s the sort of content that’s forever relevant and interesting to people looking for specific information. My photography tutorials would be a great example of evergreen content, always relevant and therefore likely to always bring traffic from people looking to learn to use their DSLR. Maximizing your SEO is also key to making this content evergreen.

SEO like a boss

Which leads me quite nicely to point two, SEO. SEO affects your contents discoverability on search engines, if you have good SEO, search engines will share your content in response to a relevant search query. All content requires good SEO (you can read my tips for mastering your SEO here), but when it comes to driving traffic to your old posts, SEO becomes even more important … (because it’ll mean your content no matter how old is shared in response to a relevant search query – evergreen content & seo is a winning combination). SEO can be hard for some people to master, luckily there are places similar to www.seoai.co.uk that might be able to help with this issue.

Use social to keep traffic coming

When you review your google analytics you’ll probably notice that quite a large chunk of your traffic comes from social referrals, the likes of twitter, Facebook, even Pinterest, mostly this will be you or other people sharing links to your features. Now we all share our latest posts on our social channels (if you don’t you’re missing a trick), but how often do you share older posts? Assuming your posts are still quality and relevant, why not mix up your social schedule and start sharing a mixture of new and old content, and pinning your older pinks. More often than not something you wrote about 6 months ago will be topical again now, and your audience may have grown or differed, so don’t forget to share it and maximise the opportunity to reach and share old content with your new readers / followers. It’s also a great way of increasing engagement with your content too.

Make old content easily discoverable on your website

There are simple design tweaks you can make to your blog which means older posts are still easily findable and discoverable to readers. The two most noticeable ways to do this are by adding a ‘you might also like’ feature to the bottom of each post (showing related features), so that people who have visited your site and enjoyed your content can go and read other similar features you’ve written (there are tons of simple widgets you can use too add this), and the second way is by adding a ‘popular posts’ function to your blog. This is a great way to ensure your most liked, viewed and commented features still have a precedes on your home page, despite being perhaps 3 years old.

Back link to relevant features

My final tip technically does fall into SEO, but I wanted to call it out as it’s a really great way of driving traffic to other posts on your blog and also boosting your blogs rankings on search too … and that’s deep link back links. Simply put, linking to your old features within new features. Regardless of the technical see benefits to doing this, the simple benefit is that it allows readers to discover other relevant posts you’ve written, or at least find further information or read more about a specific topic. I do this quite a lot within my tips features, where I may be touching briefly on or refering to a subject in one post, but I may have a really detailed post about the topic in a separate post (just like SEO today for example).

Do you have any other tips or advice for increasing the traffic to your old blog posts and evergreen content? Did you find these tips helpful?