Let’s say that your content creation services have been producing two blog posts per week for the last three years. That’s roughly 300 blog posts that are hopefully improving your SEO and bringing significant traffic to your site.

But chances are good that your marketing strategies have changed in the past three years. In fact, you might have carried some products then that are now obsolete, and the keywords you used regularly last January might not be the ones that are converting traffic today.

This is where historical optimization comes in, and we really think this is one of the more effective SEO strategies for your business if you’ve been blogging for some time. By optimizing past posts, you can get more bang for your content marketing buck. You can keep a blog post working for you for many months and maybe even years.

How Do I Know Which Posts to Optimize?

You can run an Attribution Report that helps you to know which posts get the most visitors to click on your call-to-action links and buttons. In many cases, the bulk of these posts are not the most recently published posts.

Identify which posts are your top lead generators, and then optimize them for the present. You can export your blog analytics to identify your top-performing “historical” blog posts. Look at the keywords that are working well for each of these top posts, and then edit your other posts to include these top-performing keywords. You’ll get the best results if you use the exact keywords in your posts’ calls-to-action.

Why Does Historical Optimization Work?

Updating your old blog posts may seem like a lot of work, and it can be, especially if you have a lot of content, but this work may pay off in a big way. Here’s why:

Google Likes Fresh Content

Search engines like Google reward freshness, so your old posts may move up in the SEO rankings once you’ve edited and re-published them. Readers like fresh content as well. By keeping your content fresh, you have a better chance of attracting new traffic and keeping them there to read more.

You’re Building on Authority

Instead of writing a brand new blog post from scratch, build on the existing authority your older blog post has already gained. You can do this by making changes, adding more information, and giving updates to older news.

Your Social Media May Improve

If you have your blog set up so that readers can easily share your posts on social media, your freshened-up content may lead to new shares on social media and new inbound links from other sites. As you re-promote your updated blog posts on social media, you may be able to reach out to new potential customers and gain some new traffic sources.

Should I Try Historical Optimization?

Is your business website a good candidate for historical optimization? This strategy is best suited for websites that already have several years of blog posts on their websites. We recommend that you continue to create new blog posts while you work on historical optimization because you don’t want to have large gaps in your blog. So try to achieve a balance between updating your old posts and producing brand new ones.

For more help with historical optimization–or get a free SEO analysis –reach out to us at Park Slope Softworks, your content marketing agency in Brooklyn.