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Here’s How to Update Older Blog Posts to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

If you’re a food blogger like me, I’m sure you’ve experienced the frustration of working hard on a blog post only to hear crickets after its published. As we both know, this can be super discouraging.

The good news is that an underperforming blog post doesn’t have to stay that way. With some careful research, some diligent editing and some patience, you can take an underperforming blog post and boost it in Google’s rankings.

How to Identify an Underperforming Blog Post

There’s a very handy piece of software to help you identify an underperforming. It’s called Google. Specifically, Google Search Console.

It’s likely you’ve never heard of it. Bloggers tend to focus on Google Analytics as a tool to help them build their blogs. And Google Analytics is an awesome tool for helping you understand your visitors and their behavior.

Google Search Console, on the other hand, will provide insight into your blog’s performance from a search engine’s perspective. Pretty cool, right? I mean you can learn about your visitors all day long, but if you’re not getting many of them… well, just sayin’.

Google Search Console is free to use – you just need to have a google account and some basic backend website knowledge to get it installed. Once you’re there, you want to check out your average position in Google’s search engine results. And viola! You’ll quickly & easily be able to see which of your blog posts are underperformers.

Want some high quality video instruction to help you figure this out? Check out my Food Blogger’s Guide to SEO mini-course where I’ll not only show you how to set up Google Search Console, but I’ll teach you how to conduct SEO to improve your post’s ranking in Google.

You’ve Identified an Under-Performer. Now What?

The key to getting a blog post to rank on Google is finding the right set of keywords. But choosing keywords isn’t as simple as deciding what your blog post is about and running with it. In fact, if you’re doing that, that’s why you likely have under-performing blog posts. You need to conduct keyword research.

What is Domain Authority?

Before you conduct any keyword research though, you need to understand what it is you’re looking for. Sure, you want relevant keywords and you want them to have a high monthly search volume. But you also want them to be reasonably competitive. That is, you want to select keywords that you could potentially rank for.

And the key to doing that? That’s understanding your domain authority.

Your domain authority is basically a measurement of your trustworthiness from a search engine’s perspective. If you’re the new kid on the block, Google isn’t going to send everyone your way for a chocolate chip cookie recipe. You might, however, rank for a Dairy Free Chocolate Chip Recipe.

Want to learn more about domain authority? I cover discovering your domain authority as well as how to use that information to conduct keyword research in my Food Blogger’s Guide to SEO mini course.

Conduct Keyword Research

Once you understand your domain authority, you can start looking for the right keywords. Or, more specifically, the right long-tail keywords.

A long-tail keyword is a string of relevant keywords, usually 3-4 words in length. Long-tail keywords are not only likely to be less competitive, but they’re also more likely to produce high-quality traffic. That is to say, people that are searching for exactly what it is you’re providing.

Tools for Conducting Keyword Research

Start your keyword research by creating a list of potential long-tail keywords. These should be short phrases that describe what your post is about. Try to be specific. Are you cookies dairy free? Are they gluten free? Are your fries baked? What are they seasoned with?

Once you have your list, you need to determine how often your long tail keyword gets searched, the degree of difficulty in ranking for that keyword and whether that keyword is popular among pay-for advertisers.

There are a number of tools available to do this. Some are free and others are subscription based. Moz, SEMRush, Google’s Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest are a few that I have experimented with in the past. These tools (to some degree) will provide you with the information that you’re looking for, but the best information, unfortunately, is usually locked up in the subscriptions. If you’re looking for instruction on how to navigate these tools — including the best ways to get good information for free — I cover this in my Food Blogger’s Guide to SEO mini course.

Monitoring the Success of Your SEO Efforts

After you’ve updated your underperforming blog post, you’ll have to exercise some patience. It takes time for Google to crawl and re-index your blog post. Changes in ranking can take 6-9 months, but you might start to see movement before that.

You can manually monitor your keyword’s performance by periodically checking Google’s Search Console tool. The process is the same as described above.

If you do elect to purchase an SEO research tool subscription, these tools have features that deliver weekly reports on specific keywords. These reports offer a quick-and-easy way to review keywords in mass and identify those that are climbing and those that may need some additional love.