Companies are more hesitant than ever to invest in SEO. Let’s face it: This economy sucks, so who wants to wait 12 months to get an ROI?
If you’ve been creating content and “doing SEO” for months – and you’re still not getting results – I have a solution for you.
It has taken 9 of our client’s blog posts from 4,464 to 11,964 monthly visits and from 12 to 83 monthly signups. That’s a 2.7X increase in traffic and a 6.9X increase in signups!
Sounds like BS… at what cost?
We simply revamped 9 blog posts that were dead (or dying) on our client’s blog.
You’re probably in a similar situation that they were in:
You have a BUNCH of old content that’s not getting traffic because it’s either a) not optimized correctly or b) not competitive with what’s already ranking.
(Trust me, I know because I look at all of my LinkedIn followers’ blogs.)
- What is a Blog Revamp?
- Why We’re Doubling Down on Blog Revamps to Double Our Clients’ Traffic & Signups
- Our Secret Sauce: The Blog Revamp Checklist & SOP
- How We Identify High-ROI Revamp Opportunities
- The Results: Our Analysis of 3 Blog Revamps
- Key Lessons from Revamping Blogs
- Want to 2X Your Traffic & Signups in 90 Days?
What is a Blog Revamp?
A blog revamp is when you update, refresh, and reoptimize an already-existing blog post with the goal of getting it reindexed and ranked higher on Google’s search results.
Why We’re Doubling Down on Blog Revamps to Double Our Clients’ Traffic & Signups
Updating an old blog post is nothing new.
However, we believe it’s still an underutilized tactic by most companies that are constantly publishing blog posts in an attempt to improve their SEO.
Here are 2 reasons why:
Reason #1: Speedy ROI
Marketing budgets are tight for a lot of companies.
Yet, the pressure to perform and get results from each marketing effort is higher than ever.
This has led many companies to shy away from SEO for the simple fact that it’s a long-term strategy notorious for taking months to see results.
Let’s face it: Even if you’re bought into SEO and content marketing, your executive team isn’t interested in waiting months to see an ROI.
As a result, every marketer is looking for a way to be operationally efficient, while still being able to generate new demand and new customers at scale.
But here’s the truth: The fastest way to get results is to work with what you already have.
Publishing new blog posts usually takes months to rank on the first page of Google and – in turn – generate traffic and new customers.
Revamping the blog posts that you already have takes less time than creating a new post AND increases in the ranks much faster.
So if you combine the speedy results of revamping an old blog post with a content strategy that aligns with your customers, product, and sales process (this is key), you get a speedy ROI.
As you’ll see later in this post, results pretty much always come within a month – but more often than not – days or a week.
Reason #2: You Likely Have a Bunch of Rotting Content on Your Blog
For blog revamping to work, you need one thing I bet you certainly have:
A bunch of blog posts with no signups, minimal traffic, and not ranking on Google’s all-important page one.
Any company churning out content with little to no results can quickly turn things around with blog revamping.
Even if you’re a company having success from SEO and constantly publishing new content without revamping the old content, your traffic will eventually decay – or at least plateau if you’re lucky.
There’s no way around this. Google wants the pages it ranks to be up-to-date with the most valuable information so it can provide the best experience possible to its users.
In other words, even if you publish the BEST content today, a year from now, it probably isn’t going to be the best.
This will force Google to push fresher content from your competitors to the top of its results pages – while pushing your outdated content down until it no longer gets any traffic.
Our Secret Sauce: The Blog Revamp Checklist & SOP
Revamping each blog post is always going to require unique content edits and additions.
However, I’ve found the actual process of identifying revamp opportunities and revamping them to rank on the first page of Google to be the same.
So after going through the revamp process numerous times for our clients, I decided to document everything.
What I ended up with was a 19-step action item checklist and SOP (standard operating procedure) outlining the entire process with video tutorials.
I originally created the checklist and SOPs so I could pass on the exact process to my content team to make sure every revamp has the best chance of killing it – without me being completely involved.
But I’ve also decided to give away the checklist to my followers for free. If you’re interested, you can get the Blog Revamp Checklist here:
And, if you’re interested in getting access to my full blog revamp SOP, you can access that here (warning: I’m charging for this because it’s too good to give away for free).
Spoiler alert: Our checklist isn’t something that you can simply run each blog through in 10 minutes.
It takes time. In fact, it takes me about 3.5 hours on average to revamp a blog that our agency created 2+ years ago.
This is why most companies will grab my checklist and still fail – they ain’t time got for that, but we do because it’s our job.
How We Identify High-ROI Revamp Opportunities
This is the most important step to getting an ROI from revamping your blog because you want to mainly focus on blog posts that have conversion potential.
Sure, you could revamp any blog post. But ideally, you mostly want to revamp blog posts aligned to your customers, product, and sales process, so you can generate ROI.
First and foremost, we pretty much only revamp posts that are at least 6 months old, but primarily, anything older than a year is a good candidate. (Blog posts that are over one year old benefit most from a revamp.)
Here’s a question matrix to determine whether you should revamp a blog post:
- Is the page of importance to your company?
- Is it a bottom-of-the-funnel topic? (Meaning, people search this before buying.)
- Has this page converted in the past?
- Is this page relevant to your category?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you want to ask these questions:
- Has this page’s rankings dropped more than 3 rankings?
- Has this page’s traffic dropped by more than 25%?
- Is this page ranking on the bottom of the first page or lower? Meaning, it has been published for longer than 6 months but hasn’t reached any ranking positions 1-5.
If you also answered yes to any of those questions, your blog post likely should be revamped.
Example:
Here’s an example from our client (social media post scheduling software Post Planner). This post was last updated in December 2021:
And when we look at the page in Google Search Console, we can see that it has lost more than half of its traffic in the past 6 months:
We can see in Google Analytics that this page has also converted visitors to signups in the past:
This post should definitely be revamped.
An Analysis of 3 Blog Revamps for Post Planner
After identifying nine of Post Planner’s top revamp opportunities, we ran each through our Blog Revamp SOP & Checklist and saw pretty amazing results, really fast.
After revamping these nine blog posts across 7 months:
- Monthly traffic went from 4,464 to 11,964 clicks
- Monthly signups went from 12 to 83
That’s a 2.7X increase in traffic and a 6.9X increase in signups!
Below is a breakdown of the results for three of the revamps.
Note: “Month 0” is the month before we revamped a blog post.
Blog #1
The first post we revamped in this campaign was a blog that was already getting a decent amount of traffic.
The issue?
This post had still decreased in traffic and was starting to drop in rankings. It also was a few years old and wasn’t up-to-date with relevant product CTAs.
Traffic: +85.6%
- From 1,253 to 1,978 monthly visits by month 1 (57.8% increase)
- From 1,253 to 2,326 monthly visits by month 7 (85.6% increase)
Signups: +433.3%
- From 3 to 5 monthly signups by month 1 (66.6% increase)
- From 3 to 16 monthly signups by month 7 (433.3% increase)
Blog #2
This blog post used to be one of our client’s top-performing blog posts for traffic and signups.
However, it was outdated, so we hit it with a revamp to make it competitive with the blog posts that were ranking higher.
Traffic: +297.2%
- From 537 to 1,987 monthly visits by month 1 (270% increase)
- From 537 to 2,133 monthly visits by month 6 (297.2% increase)
Signups: +733.3%
- From 3 to 8 monthly signups by month 1 (166.6% increase)
- From 3 to 25 monthly signups by month 6 (733.3% increase)
Blog #3
This blog post was ranking at the bottom of the first page for its target keyword, making it a perfect revamp candidate.
Traffic: +729.5%
- From 391 to 1,065 monthly visits by month 1 (451.8% increase)
- From 391 to 1,601 monthly visits by month 6 (729.5% increase)
Signups: +800%
- From 3 to 4 monthly signups by month 1 (33.3% increase)
- From 3 to 16 monthly signups by month 6 (800% increase)
Key Lessons from Revamping Blogs
- If a blog post’s topic is important to your company, REVAMP IT. Don’t let important content go out of date and disappear into the ether on Google.
- Prioritize blog posts with high ROI potential. Focus on posts with either conversions and rankings in the past or target keywords customers search before buying. These will provide the fastest ROI.
- Revisit and reanalyze underperforming revamps and new blog posts. Sometimes you might just need to tweak a few things with the structure of the article and its meta tags (meta tags directly impact click-through rates).
Want to 2X Your Traffic & Signups within 90 days?
If you want to 2X the current traffic and signups that you’re already getting from your blog, schedule a call with us today.
We’ll be happy to help you out, whether that means working together or not.