Blogging doesn’t come naturally or easily for everyone. Correct? But once in awhile, you come up with a great blog post idea, pour hours into the blog post, make it pretty with gorgeous stock photos, and you press publish! Then you go through your post-publishing checklist, share it on social media, and you carry on your day. You celebrate with a glas of wine or some Starbucks coffee, pet your dog or kid, and it’s dinnertime… Or for some of you, time for bed. Finally.
But here’s the kicker:
You wrote a GREAT blog post that would benefit many readers, but then it feels it’s seeping through your fingers like water, and then it’s gone, gone gone. Yes, our blog posts are evergreen, and yes, some blog posts can bring traffic to our blogs every month, but what if we could [bctt tweet=”revive some of that awesome stuff we created in the past to make sure more people read the blog and learn from us” username=””]
Well, you sure can.
Here are 5 ways to revive that incredible post you wrote.
- Update the post’s text with some related or expanded keywords. Um, say what now? But Fuse, I already have such a hard time coming up with content, and then using unique keywords in Yoast Plugin and in my photos! How in the world would I come up with even more keywords? Simple, my dear Watson, just do some quick research. Google uses the related keywords feature to help us find relevant keywords. For example, how does Google know that when I use the word “engagement” on my blog, it’s not the same word with the same meaning as the “engagement” I type on my wedding photography site? LSI baby. It stands for Latent Semantics Indexing. Fancy word. It basically means that in Google’s formula to understand text and content of a site, it knows how to determine which engagement I mean by looking at other relevant words.So for the DIY SEO blog, those other relevant words could be “content,” “blogging,” “readers,” etc. For the wedding blog, they could be the words “wedding,” “photography,” and “proposal.”
I’ve always preached alternative keywords and longer tail keywords plus rich content by being a resource for your audience, but thanks to Brian from Backlinko for the new LSI tip. I am now reviewing my blog post text and making minor adjustments by adding some LSI words.
So how can you find your LSI words?
I’ll share two ways: one more related to LSI, and the other more related to how clients look up keywords (as we tend to automatically write in our industry’s vocabulary instead of the client’s). As an example, I’m going to use a recent post I did on hosting webinars. So, first take your set of words and do a simple Google search. I Googled “how to host webinar.” Then I looked at any words in the descriptions of the results that were bolded. Those words represent some LSI words. So, I see adjectives: “successful,” “winning,” “effective,” “easy.” I also see some others like “technology,” “tools,” “audience” and “customers.”
*Now I’m going to look at the related search section at the bottom of the page, which is a section where you can find great alternative keywords for blogging.
I see “successful” again, and I also see “creating” instead of “hosting.” I now click on “how to have a successful webinar” and look at the related search results at the bottom for that term.
Now I see longer tail keywords and adjectives I can add to my original blog post. So, since my blog post was very long (my biggest ever), I like this idea of replacing “hosting” with “creating,” and also adding the word “webinar presentation” instead of just “webinar.” I also will add the word “successful.”
2. Update your Page Titles and Descriptions as well. Now I will revisit that section to see if I can make any adjustments. Here is what my current Yoast Box for that post looks like.
Now based on this research, I can make the page title and descriptions better, so I will add some words.
3. Ah… that looks way nicer. My last step is to check if I should change the alt text of any of my photos. If you’re clueless about image SEO, then take my free 5-Day Image Optimization Email Course and [bctt tweet=”learn how to optimize your photos so they can be found in Google Images.” username=””]
4. Do I need to update the actual blog post image graphics? When I first started my blog, I had some great DIY SEO posts, but the images were weak since I was not fully utilizing Pinterest SEO strategy yet. But, I can go back to great blog posts I’ve written and create new graphics, then repin those photos to Pinterest boards. I like the graphics I created for this post, but if I had to pin again, I would make sure I had great descriptive text on my pin. I started that by adding it to the alt text of the image, as you can see above, but I can go further explaining the subtopics I cover on the post.
5. Share it, baby! Since I began using CoSchedule, this is the easiest part of it all! So, CoSchedule has a kick-butt feature where they show your top posts utilizing which posts have done extremely well on social media. It serves as an editorial and marketing calendar. Read up on reasons why I feel you should join Coschedule here.
And, by the way, I can actually start here to see which ones were the top posts, then go all the way back to the top and follow those exact steps. So, If you see “0 coming,” that means you don’t have any scheduled shares for these blog posts. So using the app right inside my WordPress dashboard, I can reschedule it out to Google Plus, Pinterest, Twitter, Linked and my Facebook Biz page. I’ll schedule out for at least a week on Twitter at different time, then one month after (it prompts you to post next week and next month, and they also have a custom date option). Then I will repin if needed (like if I made a new graphic), and I will share a few times on Gplus and share again on my FB Biz Page. This takes me only a couple of minutes. [bctt tweet=”Social proof is an important part of getting old blog posts to get more traffic once again.” username=””]
Then, I can sit back and enjoy seeing my great content get new traffic and be shared once again. Feel free to use this technique before starting your next blog post. Once you’ve finished doing these tasks, come back and report your findings.
I am happy to share that I will be doing a blog series on Periscope all about blogging. Check the hashtag #blogwithfuse to find out the exact times, or join my free Facebook Group. This series will be set for Wednesdays on Periscope.