Not all SEO and content marketing tips apply to your goals. Some keywords work better, the optimal word count varies depending on your audience, and some topics never do well in specific niches.
In short, you should apply digital marketing tactics that fit your goals, target audiences, and industry. SEO experts continuously manage, audit, and improve every aspect of a website or blog to ensure consistent ROI. Sometimes, it takes a few changes to get the right keywords, design, and structure to climb up the SERPs.
If you have an underperforming blog, you likely didn’t make the best choice somewhere in your implementation. The key is to audit your underperforming blog posts, look at the data, and spot the aspects you can improve.
Remember, you don’t have to delete or replace a blog post. You just have to revamp the content and SEO to start getting more out of them.
Here are a few easy optimizations you can do to boost an underperforming blog post:
1. Do a New Run of Keyword Research
Keyword rankings depend on how audiences conduct their searches. Hence, new keywords may appear, and high-volume ones fall off. That’s why it’s best to regularly perform a fresh run of keyword research every so often, so you can replace and optimize for new and more desirable keywords.
That said, changing search volumes isn’t the only reason to reoptimize your keywords. In some cases, it isn’t the search volume that’s the problem but the relevance of the keywords with the blog post’s content.
This can happen when the blog post’s topic and discussions aren’t relevant to the chosen keywords. Search engine algorithms aim to deliver the best, most relevant, and most informative content to the searchers. So even if you’ve strategically chosen a high-volume keyword, an irrelevant blog post isn’t going to get as much traffic or conversions.
2. Compare the Data With Your Best-Performing Blog Posts
If a few of your blog posts are getting less traffic than others, look at your best-performing posts and see what others are missing.
That said, there could be many reasons one is doing better than others. You can start by looking at and comparing the following:
- Writing style (tone, language, niche slang, etc.)
- Click-through rates
- Bounce rates
- Word count
- Formatting (font styles, text size, sectionings, headings, etc.)
- Images and videos
- Audience targeting (who you’re writing for)
- Keywords (search volumes, relevance, stuffing, cannibalization, etc.)
- Promotion (social media, email lists, newsletters, and so on)
- Backlinks
- Internal and external links
- General content quality (Is one more complete or informative than the other?)
As many factors are at play, you want to be thorough with your auditing. You can use tools like Google Search Console to get as much data on your blog as possible, allowing you to better analyze and compare the differences.
As a general tip, if one of your blog posts are doing way better than the rest, you should use it as a reference for how to make new content and reoptimize old ones.
3. Update Outdated Information
Outdated information is a one-way ticket to falling off the SERP rankings. People have little to no use for them, so a blog riddled with them will be ignored by search engines and audiences alike.
New laws, trends, technology, and products can affect your niche. For example, a new law might change a few legal processes in your state, so you should update your legal guides accordingly. Likewise, a new software update means it’s time to add new information to your tech posts.
If your competition publishes more relevant and timely in formation, they’ll eventually overtake you in the SERPs. So updating your older posts should be done even before they start to fall off. This way, you won’t have to wait for site crawlers to pick up on the changes made after slipping down the rankings.
4. Pay Attention to Formatting and Design
If people can’t properly consume your blog post, it won’t matter how good the actual text is. Blog posts that are hard to read and difficult to understand aren’t going to keep site visitors on your page. Likewise, you don’t want your website to be buggy, slow, or user-unfriendly.
So, pay attention to the following:
- Site speed or loading times
- Color schemes
- Navigation and menus
- Links and anchor texts
- Text style, size, and color
- Headings and lists
Basically, website optimization can affect the consumption of your content. You want to make it easy for people to read your blogs and explore your website.
5. Promote Your Underperforming Blog Posts
Some blog posts need a head start. Directing traffic into newly-optimized posts is a great way to get things going. You can do this for posts with newly-updated information, high-quality posts that fell off, and older posts that might be relevant to your newest content.
So, link and promote them on your social media, newsletters, and email drips. You can also add links to older posts to newer ones, as long as they’re relevant and can be incorporated into appropriate anchor texts.
