- [Neil] Hi everyone, it's Neil Patel, and today is another day of Content Marketing Unlocked. Today, we're going to be breaking down how you can optimize your existing content. A lot of you already have websites in which you already have some sort of content, and yes, you want to produce new content, but a easy way to generate more traffic is by updating your existing content.
Although on my blog I'm writing roughly four to five blog posts on a monthly basis, my team is updating 90. That's how much time we spend optimizing existing content and that's what's lead us to a lot of traffic over the years. This course is what I would do with my own internal content marketing campaign each and every single day and that's what I'm going to be teaching you as well.
Here is Google's Core Update. They've had many of these and one thing we've noticed is people who update their content on a regular basis are generating more traffic than people who aren't. And this is what's interesting.
A lot of people are like, "Okay, I'm just going to go in and adjust a few words. " When I'm saying updating, you're deleting irrelevant information or if the content is no longer valid, like it's talking about Myspace, well no one uses Myspace or cares about it any more. Delete it.
Keep your content relevant, fresh, and the best for your readers. That means you may have to update multiple paragraphs, delete some information, add videos, add images. Whatever it may be, make it the best piece of content around that topic.
And if you do that, you'll get a lot of traffic in the long run. What you'll want to do next is make sure your content is always actionable and useful, because if you do that, you usually will continue to rank in the long run. If the content is no longer relevant, either you want to delete it or 301 redirect it to the most relevant URL.
A 301 redirect tells Google, hey, this page is no longer existing, but this other page is similar and transfer all the traffic and the links and the search rankings to that other page. You also want to make your content evergreen, so you want to remove dates. If you're teaching people how to get more traffic, why would you include a date because the article isn't just relevant for today.
It also could be used a year from now. You, of course, want to fix your SEO errors, too, and your dead links because that creates a poor user experience. To fix your SEO, you want to go into Ubersuggest and click on the Site Audit Report in the left side bar.
And then, type in your URL. When you do this, it'll analyze your whole site. It could take up to 10 minutes if you have a big site.
Go through it, fix those errors and then, continually improve and tweek your site. If you create a project in the Dashboard, which you can also find on the left hand navigation of Ubersuggest, you add your website, it'll actually check for SEO issues every week so you don't have to do it manually and will email you ever time it finds new issues that you need to fix. Another thing I want you to do is update your pages.
It's not just about blog posts. It's about all pages on your website. This will help you improve authority within your niche.
You want to take keywords that are very similar in multiple pages and combine them because no one wants to read the same thing over and over again. You want to explore fewer topics but in greater detail. Like, if you look at Wikipedia, they do really well because not only do articles keep getting updated, but they go super thorough on every single topic out there.
Like look up Abraham Lincoln. Wikipedia has one of the most thorough pages I've ever seen on Abraham Lincoln. Then, of course, you want to merge duplicate content to avoid repetition and when you merge it, you want to use 301 redirects.
There's also the Page Experience algorithm. This is about providing the best experience. You can use Crazy Egg, which is a heat map analytics tool to figure out how people are interacting with your website.
And by using Crazy Egg, what you can end up doing is look at what people are doing, how they're interacting, if they're getting stuck on your page. It tracks mouse movements and clicks and then adjusts from there, so that way, you're creating a better experience for people. Remember, it's not about Google, it's about people, because Google wants to rank the sites at the top that people love the most.
When you're optimizing for user experience, a few things to look for. Make sure your website loads fast. The Ubersuggest Site Audit Report will tell you what's wrong with your site speed and how to fix it.
You also want to reduce any errors that you have. Google Search Console will show you these. You want to compare your experience to your competition and make sure you have a better user experience.
Always analyze and optimize your design. And of course, install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension. It's free.
It'll keep giving you new ideas on what people are looking for and trends so you can make sure you're creating the best experience for users. Another thing that's super important that a lot of people take for granted when it comes to content is brand queries. The more people that search for your brand name, the higher you'll rank over time.
As my brand name increase, so does my overall traffic for non-branded related keywords. This just goes to show that experience really matters because you're not going to build a brand name by faking it or running paid ads. You tend to build experience by doing what's best for people and that's what wins in the long run.
A quick win: it's much easier and faster to add relevant keywords and content to existing content than it is to create new content. What I mean by that is it's easier to go to your old content that you already have on your website, modify it, add in new keywords that can generate you more traffic and adjust it wherever you need to maximize your traffic. How do you do that?
Well, when you're optimizing for impact, I want you to first log into Google Analytics and in the left navigation, click on behavior, and then click on landing pages. These are the top performing pages on your website. This is where you want to start.
You can also go into Google Search Console and click on search results and again, you can see all the keywords that are providing you with the most traffic and that are most relevant. And I want you to keep those pages in mind and the keywords in mind because we're about to go through a process of optimizing your site. The first is look for click through rates lower than four or 5%.
When pages have a click through rate of lower than four or 5%, there tends to be a lot of opportunity to improve your traffic by just including the right key words or updating the content, making it more relevant and thorough than the competition. I want you to go to the pages that are ranking well, but have low click through rates and make sure the meta key word, the meta, not really meta keywords, but the title and meta description tag have the keywords in there. Make sure you have keywords within your heading tag, within the body tags, within all tags if you have images.
Make sure code is all buttoned up. If you're using Schema Markup and you can do this and double check all this stuff using the site Audit Report within Ubersuggest. In essence, you want to take a framework of optimizing your content of looking at your URLs, is it SEO friendly, does it have keywords in there, is your titles optimized, and going back to actually the URLs, if you change your URLs, you have to 301 redirect your old URLs to your new.
Do your title tags have the right keywords? Are you using visual media to make the experience better? Are you linking to other sites to back up your sources?
Are you optimizing the images with ALT tags, are you using relevant keywords? You want to also try to include those keywords in the top 100 words within your post. Does your webpage load fast?
No one likes slow loading sites? Are you optimizing your page for social shares? It's just not about Google.
Facebook is a huge company. Do you also have high word count? And you don't want to have high word count for the sake of it, but more so, to be in depth.
If it doesn't make sense, then don't have high word count. For example, if you're creating a video on how to tie a tie or a article, you don't really need a ton of words. You just need to make something relevant and simple, and ideally, you can do that through images or info graphic.
And of course, is your webpage compatible with mobile devices, tablets, not just desktop computers. And when you modify your content to include the keywords in the top 100, to expand your content, to make it more relevant, to include the keywords that you're finding using Ubersuggest, which we shared in the previous videos, then you want to go back into Google Search Console, click on URL inspector, and put in your URL of the page that you just updated and have them re-crawl it. But doing that, it'll re-index it and you'll start getting more traffic.
Now, some easy ways to increase your click through rate, this is how many people are searching on Google, they see your listing, and are clicking through. People that don't click through, it hurts your click through rate. The people that do click through, it helps your click through rate.
I found that if you include the words like how to, or free, or tips, or best, or blog post, or great or tricks, sometimes even including the date or the year in the title tag, like updated in year XYZ, all those things help increase click throughs from what we've tested. So in summary, look for keywords that have less than a 5% click through rate in Google Search Console, look for pages that have less than a 4% click through rate. Make sure that the keywords that you want to rank for are in the title tag of your site.
Once you make the changes, submit it to Google Search Console, they'll re-crawl your site and then, boom, you should get more traffic over time. You have to give it roughly 30 days to see results, but when you give it 30 days, you'll start seeing slow and gradual increases. With SEO, you just don't see big booms right away.
It's very rare. And you'll want to do this on a monthly cadence. I always rewrite my top pages on a monthly basis, my top blog post.
By continually updating and improving, that's how I keep growing my traffic. Some action items for you, go to neilpatel. com/training.
This is the last, and then click on content marketing unlocked. Now, under week one, this is the last video, and then I want you to go through the Content Production Master Resource Guide that'll help you produce and master your content, and then the Content Marketing Resource Links. By going through both of them, you'll be able to optimize your existing content and generate more traffic.
Next week, we're going to be going over the different types of content, how to create and build cluster pages. If you don't know what some of these things are, don't worry. We're going to go over content templates for the most effective content types and that'll help speed up the process.
And of course, guest contributors to write content for you. That way, you can increase your content production. I hope this helps you save a lot of time and generate more traffic with your existing content.
It should if you follow everything. If you have any questions, leave a comment below. If you enjoy this video, subscribe to the channel, like it, share it, tell other people about it.
And if you just want to see your content marketing for you, check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital. Thank you.
