Many times businesses will call this “revamping old content” or will go through and spruce up pages after completing a content audit. Refreshing your archive pages, however, does not necessarily have to be a blog post, and it does not refer to just sprucing up a page and fixing statistics and broken links. Although this is all a part of a refresh, refreshing your archive pages is a much more involved method. It involves creating better content entirely based on recent trends and news happening in your industry.
Step-by-Step Guide to Refreshing Your Archive Pages
There are several different steps to making it happen so that you can take the authority of your current pages and alter them to improve your search rankings for those pages (and hopefully your website as a whole). Keep in mind that you should not refresh every archive page, but only the ones that are performing well (more on this later). Still, it may be time consuming to refresh all of your archive pages, but the actual work itself won’t take you long.
Below explains how to get started and what steps to take to be successful:
Finding Your Most Valuable Archived Posts
Again, you don’t want to try and refresh every archived post you have because that would take up entirely more time than it’s worth. You only need to worry about your best performing posts and pages from the last six months (less if you prefer). To find these pages:
- Go to your Google Analytics and go to your Behavior category on the left-hand side.
- Under the Behavior category click Site Content.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page/ report to look at All Pages.
- The pages with the highest number of pageviews should be at the top.
- Make your own spreadsheet of all the posts that showed up first for pageviews over the last six months.
Below is a screenshot that shows how you can get to all of this data. Creating your own spreadsheet is important to help you keep things organized and start keeping track of the changes you make, much like an audit.
Extra: In addition to finding your most popular archived page, you can use this data to find inspiration for future blog posts. For example, in the screenshot above you can see that the post about referral traffic was popular. Therefore, it may be a good idea to write an advanced post about referral traffic since that one was for beginners. I recommend adding in ideas into your spreadsheet as well so you don’t miss any potential opportunities.
Refreshing Your Archive Pages
Search expert Neil Patel briefly covered this topic here, so below are a few of his thoughts as well as our own that cover how to go about a successful refresh:
Alter Your Headline to Focus on Shareability
Writing a headline that urges people to share your content is a big one, and in fact it is a science to some people. In the past when you published some of your archived posts social sharing may not have been quite as big of a deal, but today it’s extremely important to earn more visibility and get more clicks. Below is a screenshot from Neil Patel that shows the different types of headlines you can create and then how likely those different types are to be shared:
Again, a lot goes into creating the perfect headline, some of which also includes testing different headlines. Learn about the science behind headlines.
Create Videos, Infographics, etc. to Spice Up the Content
If you can take the content you created and then add a video or some sort of visual or interactive element, you will keep people on your page much longer and refresh your old content. Oftentimes companies will even put something like “[Infographic]” in the headline, which also brings us back to the benefits of the last point.
According to a Cisco study reported on by The Guardian, by 2017 video will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic. This can be a time consuming process, but it will be well worth it in the end.
Find Case Studies and Statistics to Back Up Your Claims
When you originally published your now-archived content, many statistics and case studies related to that topic were not yet published. Now that you’re going back and doing a refresh, you can research more information and not only improve the statistics you already had in the article, but add in new and more relevant options altogether. This will help improve your credibility and authority overall.
Do you have any more thoughts about refreshing archived content or any personal stories to share? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
Republished by permission. Original here.
Archives Photo via Shutterstock
This article, "Secrets That Will Spruce Up Your Archive Pages" was first published on Small Business Trends
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