[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
Hey guys! I’m Solomon with Clickx. For today’s marketing hack, I’m going to help you keep your content up-to-date. A lot of people have stale old blog posts that are really not generating any new traffic. So my job here is to show you how to keep your content up-to-date!
Let’s get started.
Continue To Routinely Produce New Content
So, we all understand that producing new content regularly, it is the rule, right? It’s the internet marketing rule number one! Keep producing more and more content.
We say that content is king! You’ve heard that all the time by now. You got to create engaging content, make it awesome: add images, calls to action, do all sorts of stuff to get more content, but we never ever hear anybody saying, “update your content.” Nobody ever talks about updating content. Why? Because it’s sort of like a secondary thought, like you’re all worried about getting more content.
Update Old Content Instead Of Trying To Make New Content Stick
Let’s put it this way: We’re too busy. We’re like, “Oh! I’ve got to come up with three blog posts by noon, so I’m just going to keep typing.” That’s what everybody’s doing and what happens is that you’re just kind of like throwing crap at the wall and hoping it’s going to stick! So, what I want to talk about today is it slightly different and there is a concept of keeping your content that you already have updated. That means you’re going to go back and add more content to it and there’re some signs behind it. I want to give you some tips on how you can do that and there’s a lot more traffic you can generate than just creating more and more content. Because in online marketing world, it is really competitive out there! So, you can’t just create more content hoping it’s going to stick. You’re going to have to make your content stick, which means you’re going to have to make it better than your competitors.
Google Pays Close Attention To Your Current Content
Now, I want you to know why I’m suggesting this. Because, Google pays very close attention to how often you produce new blog posts, creating new videos, creating new podcasts, or whatever it might be that you do.
So, everybody gets the first part. So they’re like, “Yeah! I know I need to produce new content, because Google is going to crawl it and they’re going to see my new blog post.”
It sounds great, but nobody ever talks about you need to enhance the content that you already have and how much close attention Google pays to that!
Now, first of all, you might be the company that really hasn’t spent any time creating content period. Trust me, I’ve experimented throwing your website together, not writing any new blog posts or new content. So since there’s really no new content on it, what happens is that the traffic just starts to decline. Every year or every month you see, the organic traffic just goes down! For the ones that you continue to write more content, it’s either steady or going up depending on how good your content is, how long it is, how effective it is, and whether or not you optimize your content; you can start to generate upward trend of traffic! So, we understand that concept.
Turn Your Content Strategy To Updating Not Creating
Now, what you really need to understand is how you can keep it going steady climbing on a regular basis! My hack is to update! You’re too focused on creating! So, you don’t have to worry about creating. What I mean by updating? What I mean is, go back and update your content significantly add 500 more words. It’s probably a lot easier to add more words to an existing piece of content than to come up with a 2,000 word blog posts in the first place. Go look at your most visited pages, your services page, or about this page, or even your home page! Look at your top blog post and go back and figure out how you can make this better! If you can enhance every section of it with another three or four sentences, trust me you’re going to have a thousand more words at the end of this. You know it’s sort of an experiment and you’ll be able to create more value for the person that’s already coming to that page than just leaving it alone or creating another blog post almost talking about the same thing.
I want you to really understand that Google pays very close attention to how often you update the content and how significant the updates are. So, Google’s just not coming back for you to update three sentences like, “Oh, Google! I changed some sentences.? Google’s like, “I want to see new stuff! I want you to be like the CNN, live blogging, just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger!” If you start doing that, if you can really, really, really scale the hell out of that blog post, and you have another one that you’re updating, maybe you’re adding a video to it, maybe you’re adding a checklist to it, maybe you’re adding some social media elements to it and you’re really are making significant update, then that page is going to stick better! Trust me when I tell you this!
Combine Multiple Blog Posts That Relate To One Unique Post
By combining multiple blog posts into one large piece, what you’re really doing is making your content more unique! That means that this blog post and the other blog post; there’s a clear delineation of what you’re trying to say here and another blog post rather than trying to have five blog posts that almost talks about the same thing. You realize that it’s very competitive! That means that you need to make your content more unique and you need to make it better, you need to stand out from your competitors, then only Google is going to reward that content and actually show it on search results! So, I think here’s what it comes down to. In SEO, it’s really…really about being better than your competitors. Being better than your competitors in terms of authority, better in content, better in user engagement getting more people coming to your website sharing it and if you can work out making it better user-friendly, people will love it, they want to share it! You worked a lot in creating video content or enhancing the existing content. You’re updating it constantly, because you care, you just don’t want to throw it out there and say, “Oh! I’m just going to keep producing more content, see what it sticks.” You care so much, but you want to make it better for the people that are out there, you’re going to naturally see that if you take that approach other than just trying to do anything and everything you have 500 different ideas; nothing is really put together, well! You’re going to see long-term success folks. Especially, a post that you created two years ago, how much traffic it is getting now! Alright! Three years ago, what kind of traffic do you get to that post! I bet you a lot of them are buried where it’s a good place to bury a dead body, the second page of Google! You’re probably not even on the second page; you’re probably under 18th page or not even showing up in the first 10 pages. So, what’s the use of having all this dead weight on your website! It’s probably burying your site down, more consolidate it folks! Update it, consolidate it, get a better new strategy about your current content asset and figure out how you’re going to do it!
Generate More Traffic With Lengthy, Up-To-Date Content
A lot of big websites do this as well, not just the small ones. I’ve seen sites with fewer pages getting more traffic just because their content is super long and lengthy and that’s all they write. They just write really nice lengthy post, and they keep updating those lengthy post. It just really talks about one subject and that’s it! It ranks for every long tail; you can imagine those are amazing. They’re like I could eat off of that, okay! It’s amazing! So, I want you to think about that and not just create more super short 300 word blog post and think that it’s going to work magic! It probably won’t! You’re not going to get noticed!
Now, I do generate traffic leads and customers take advantage of this idea and definitely you’ll get more traffic!
Thank you again for watching another edition of marketing hack of the day.
