TAKE YOUR BLOG TO NEW HEIGHTS WITH THESE TOP CONTENT TIPS

Transform your content and increase your traffic by applying the principles of growth-driven design to your blog.

When’s the last time you rewrote or updated one of your old blog entries? If you haven’t updated your content since you posted it, you may be missing out on a great opportunity to boost your traffic.

Even your evergreen content can benefit from an update now and then. 

 That’s one of the tricks I learned while watching Neil Patel speak at his Advanced Content Marketing Summit 2017.

Watching Neil Patel and some of the other presenters, it was clear that content remains an important driver of traffic to your website.

But, as more website owners realize this fact, we content marketers have to continue to innovate to stay ahead of the pack.

One way to keep your blog relevant and engaging is to regularly update your content in response to new information. This method of continual review and revision is very similar to the popular growth-driven design method of web design.

I love the concept of growth-driven design. Why wait to realize the benefits once you've recognized an opportunity?

Growth-Driven Design is Responsive Design

In his ebook, An Introduction to Growth Driven Design, Luke Summerfield explains that growth-driven design (GDD) is a method of website design that allows businesses to lower their initial costs and focus the efforts on creating an optimal user experience.

Websites built using the growth-driven design model aren’t static works that are only modified during large redesigns. GDD sites are dynamic and changeable. Modifications to the site are made in response to user interactions and feedback, facilitating constant improvement.

Instead of leaving underperforming pages in place until the next major overhaul, modifications are regularly made and the results analyzed.

Growth-driven design is the agile web designer's secret weapon. And, it can be a blogger's secret weapon, too.

What does a responsive content upgrade look like?

It isn’t just your website’s design that can be improved by performance analytics and user feedback. This same method of reassessment and revision can be used to improve your content too.

As part of his presentation during the Advanced Content Marketing Summit 2017, Neil Patel walked us through how he revises content to transform a good article into a 10X one.

To decide what content to upgrade, Neil’s team determines which blogs are getting clicks what web users are seeking when they click on a popular blog post.

The team uses search analysis, backlink profiles, and trending topic reports to identify articles worth revisiting and the current hot topics related to those articles. Then, the team gets to work adding more information and related keywords about those topics to each piece.

At the end of the process, the original blog has been transformed into a skyscraper piece that is several thousand words long and covers the original blog’s subject thoroughly. For an in-depth look at Neil's content restoration process check out his article, Bring Old Blog Posts Back to Life: 5 Strategies that Work.

If you don't have access to the same tools as Neil, that's okay. You can uncover trending topics without subscribing to a research service, it just takes a little detective work. Go where your customers are and read what they have to say.

I like to engage in social listening on sites such as Reddit and Quora. Participating in smaller forums related to your niche can yield lots of information as well. Reviews are a great way to learn from your past mistakes and find out what you're getting right. Read the reviews customer post about you and your competitors to find out what your audience likes and wants.

Finally, if you haven’t tried it yet, pay a visit to Answer the Public and see what its impatient sage has to say. 

Which articles should you spend your time revising?

Unless your blog is relatively new, you probably don’t want to go back through all of its entries and rewrite every one. So how do you choose which ones deserve your attention? 

The answer lies in a classic application of the Pareto Principle, a.k.a. the 80/20 Rule.

As Ian Cleary explains in 5 Compelling Reasons You Should Republish Old Blog Content, your top articles are responsible for generating the bulk of your traffic. So you should focus the bulk of your attention on making modifications to your high-traffic articles.

By choosing an article that already receives favorable attention, you know that you are working from a good foundation.

It isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time to improve an article that no one wants to read.

You already know that providing readers with relevant, up-to-date content reduces bounce rates and keeps your audience coming back for more. With updated content, you’ll rescue your best articles from the drop-off that usually comes with the passage of time.

Sometimes it’s the Little Things That Matter the Most

If you’ve weighed the pros and cons of rewriting your old content and decided to skip that undertaking, all is not lost. You can still improve your blog’s performance with a few little changes. In fact, to make these improvements, you won’t need to change the body of your blog posts at all.

Formatting your URL: A blog post never tells it age?

The issue of whether to include dates within a post’s URL is a surprisingly contentious one. ShoutMeLoud’s Harsh Agrawal outlines the conflict in The Effect of Showing Last Update Date Stamp on Blog Traffic [Case Study], he writes:

We’ve already established that dates on a blog post enhances user experience. At the same time, however, this case study has clearly shown that if dates are displayed in Google’s SERP’s, keyword ranking and blog traffic are negatively impacted.

Neil Patel also mentioned this phenomenon during his content summit presentation, noting that traffic for his posts increased after he removed the dates for their URLs.

No one is quite sure why dates seem to have a negative effect on a blog post’s search performance.

However, Yoast CEO, Joost de Valk, offers one possible explanation in his article, The Perfect WordPress SEO Permalink Structure. He writes that “When you add dates to your permalink structure, you automatically ‘date’ your posts.” Because consumers tend to prefer new content, revealing your blog post’s age may cost you clicks. 

De Valk recommends that bloggers omit the date from any new content they create and weigh the benefits of changing the URLs of past blog entries. He includes a handy redirect code in his article that you can add to your .htaccess file to ensure that your blog posts don’t get lost if you do decide to make the change.

If you still want blog visitors to see each post’s date, Harsh Agrawal recommends using a Javascript workaround that reveals the date to humans but not search engines.

Without that first click, nothing else matters.

One of the quickest ways to boost an underperforming blog post is to pep up its title.

Hubspot’s Corey Wainwright opens her article, How to Write Catchy Headlines and Blog Titles Your Readers Can’t Resist, with the observation that “It’s one thing to write great content, but it’s another thing to get it read and ranked.”

During the Advanced Content Marketing Summit 2017, BuzzSumo’s Steve Rayson gave an amazing presentation detailing how to craft a headline that resonates with users.

The information he shared was gained from analyzing one million headlines. Based on his findings, Rayson told us that a great headline needs five separate components. Not only do you need to tell potential readers what your content will deliver but you also have to make them care.  

 Back to You

Now, here’s a twist that I didn’t expect when I began researching for this article. If you scroll down to the bottom of Wainwright’s article, you’ll find this editor’s note: “This post was originally published in October 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.”

See, updating your content does get you more clicks!

Are you ready to drive traffic to your blog with these growth-driven design tips?

After you make your changes, let me know how it turns out. I’d love to hear about your content marketing successes.