Blog SEO Tips for Optimizing Old Posts

Kevin Leary

October 25, 2012

I’d like to share a few Blog SEO tips regarding how to optimize old (well written), underperforming blog post’s by performing a live experiment. I’ll be using an existing post from the OpenView Labs website, optimizing it, and tracking it’s performance here. Hopefully this will help you understand that new content isn’t necessarily where you should be spending all of your time. Depending on your specific content, improving what you already have can be more beneficial.

The Old, Underperforming Post

The post that I’ll be optimizing is titled “Why Most Growing Companies Misunderstand Product Management”. It’s a great piece of content, that has the potential to be truly valuable to someone building a product management team, or re-structuring an exist team, a common scenario for a software company. Unfortunately, it’s barely visited and is collecting dust in the archives of the Labs website.

Starting Point Stats

Let’s document the performance of this post before any optimization are made. This will serve as a benchmark that we can measure against.

We’ll be tracking the SERP Position, or the specific position where this blog post ranks in search engines for our targeted keywords and the total number of visitors per month.

SERP Position	Visits (monthly)
Not in the top 50	44

Target / Goal

The optimizations that I make to this article will increase our search engine numbers. I’m projecting the results below, let’s see if I can do it in the next 2 weeks!

SERP Position	Visits (monthly)
1-10	1000-2000

Observed Results

Once the results are in, I’ll post them here!

SERP Position	Visits (monthly)
?	?

Specific Optimizations

The first of the Blog SEO tips I have for you is to optimize this post for search engines, we need to pick a specific keyword combination that we want to target. The keyword combination we choose should:

Be highly relevant to the content discussed in the article
Have a decent amount of people searching for it each month
Have a reasonable level of competition that we can compete with, and beat for the top spot on Google

Choosing a Target Keyword

Finding a keyword combination that you want to rank for in search engines is the first step of the process. Originally, the article was optimized for the keyword “product development”, but we don’t rank anywhere near the top of search results for that keyword so it isn’t driving any traffic.

We need to find a new target keyword that we can rank on the first page for. I use a combination of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool to do this.

The Google keyword tool allows you to check the monthly traffic volume for certain keywords. Using this tool I have found the keyword “new product development strategy”, and I know that 2900 searches are performed on Google each month. I also know that Google see’s the competition for this keyword as “Low”, which is good. The less competition for a keyword the more likely we are to rank on page 1.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool results for “new product development strategy” keyword

Next, I’ll run the “new product development strategy” keyword through the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool to understand whether or not it’s something that we can potentially rank on page 1 for. Through experimentation I have found that we can often rank well for a keyword with a difficulty rating under 50%. This keyword has a rating of 48%, which is great, so we’ll target this keyword in our experiment.

SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool results for “new product development strategy” keyword

On Page Optimizations

Now that we have a keyword to focus on, we need to optimize our article for that specific keyword. At OpenView we use a WordPress plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast to manage our on page SEO optimizations.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin makes managing on-page SEO simple

Linkdex Reports

This plugin allows us to run an on-page report right inside of WordPress, completely free with the help of the Linkdex SEO service.

Linkdex SEO On Page Report results in WordPress for “new product development strategy” keyword focus

The report from Linkdex gives us informed advice on adjustments that we can make to optimize the article for our keyword. Generally, these suggestions include advice to make sure you are:

Optimizing your page titles correctly, ensuring that they are the right length and include the keyword
Optimizing the URL for the page
Using a good meta description containing the primary keyword / phrase
Have the right number of outbound link(s)
Using your keyword / keyphrase in any subheading (such as an H2) in your copy
Using the keyword in the first paragraph of the copy to make sure the topic is clear immediately
Using the keyword enough in your article (keyword density)
Optimizing your images properly
Score well on the Flesch Reading Ease test

Now that I know what I need to change, let’s go through the updates that I’ll make to optimize this old blog post for search engines.

What I’m Changing

Using the suggestions from our WordPress SEO plugin, along with a few best practices I know to be true, I’ve performed the following updates to the old post:

Changed the title to “New Product Development Strategy & Management Advice”
Changed the post URL slug from “perspectives-on-product-managements-saeed-khan-explains-why-most-growing-companies-misunderstand-product-management” to “/new-product-development-strategy/”.
Gracefully added (not forced) the new target keyword to the content in 6 placed for keyword density
Cleaned up and structured the post content to make it easier to scan, adding block quotes, changing H3’s to H2’s and removing some bad HTML from the post source code
Replaced the existing photo with a new, more relevant and engaging photo using the Photodropper plugin
Split large paragraphs into smaller, bit sized chunks to make the post less intimidating and easier to read
Added bullet points and numbered lists where appropriate

In Conclusion

Now that we’ve made our optimizations, it’s a waiting game for Google to pick-up the updates. This usually takes a few days, but it may be different for your website. I haven’t done much in terms of off site SEO, but that may come in a follow-up post.

These optimizations should improve our search rankings for this old blog article in the coming week, at which point I will follow-up and publish the results here.