Republished content how to update our blog.

 As of today, our blog has 250 published posts. And according to Ahrefs' Content Explorer, 61pages have been republished at least once. And if you look at the traffic trends over thepast three years, you'll see that nearly all of our republished pages have consistently beengaining more and more search traffic over time. Now, the best part about this SEO strategyis that increases in traffic can happen almost immediately, as you can see here, here, and here. So if you want to know how to get organic traffic fastby simply refreshing older content, then stay tuned.

 [music] When you update content, you can't just recreateany old page and expect to get a quick boost in organic traffic. There are some requirements in page selectionand you actually need to update the content with some thought. Plus, your website should follow at leastthe basic SEO best practices. So you should have good content, a technicallysound website, and have some kind of website authority; meaning, you're not a new site orhave no links pointing at any of your pages. 

Updating content isn't a magic trick that'llsend a torrent of organic traffic your way. So if you fall short of this criteria, then I recommendwatching some of our beginner-level videos first to amp up your site. And I'll link those up in the description. But if your site matches this criteria, thenlet's get started with the first step, which is to diagnose pages where your contentis responsible for underperformance. Content is obviously a huge contributor toyour ranking success. 

But it's not always going to be the main reasonwhy you're not ranking in the top 3 positions. So the first thing we need to do is actuallyidentify that a content issue exists. And there are four main things to look out for. First, check the age of your page. It takes time to acquire backlinks and forGoogle to understand where your page fits in the SERP. So as a general rule of thumb, you shouldgive your page around 6-12 months to rank before considering a major update. Second, you need to check that the pageis targeting a meaningful keyword. And for the purposes of this video, I'll definea "meaningful" keyword as a topic that has potential to get search traffic. 

For example, this post on how to start a linkbuilding campaign fast, isn't targeting a keyword. So we wouldn't update it for the purpose ofgetting more organic traffic. You should be able to tell right away whetheryou're targeting a keyword from your page title and URL. But if you're not 100% sure, you can double-check if the topic has traffic potential by going to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and enteringa query you think could have traffic potential. Then scroll down to the SERP overview tableand look at the amount of search traffic the top ranking pages get. And now you just need to assess whether thetopic is worth updating based on the time and resources required for the potential traffic gain. Now, I don't want you to think that I'm sayingto only update pages with traffic potential. For example, we create data studies whichhelps us build links, contribute to the SEO community, and also flex our big-data muscles.

 But since we're talking about updating pagesfor more organic traffic, we'll skip over these types of pages for the purposes of this tutorial. Alright, so third, make sure your page isn't alreadyranking in the top 3 for its target keyword. Minor updates are usually fine, but generallyspeaking, if you're already ranking in the top positions, you probably don't want to do a fullrewrite and potentially lose those rankings. There's obviously exceptions to this rule,but let's keep this tutorial simple. Alright, so to find pages that aren't rankingin the top 3 positions, you can use either Google Search Console or Ahrefs' Site Explorer. With Search Console, go to the Performanceor Search Results report, and then make sure that you have the average position selected. Next, let's set a Positions filter to only showkeywords that are ranking in position 4 or higher. From here, you'd want to look through your listof queries and try and spot topics you're targeting.

 Now, since Search Console shows averagepositions, it usually isn't a great representation of where your page ranks today. So you can use Ahrefs Site Explorer to getmore current ranking positions. So I'll enter our blog URL here and run the search. Next, I'll go to the Top pages report, whichwill show us pages that generate the most search traffic in our blog subfolder. Ideally, you want to find pages where you're notranking in the top 3 for your primary keyword. And an easy way to spot this is to look atthe page URLs, along with the top keyword and its position. So after going through the list, I founda post that can benefit from an update. Our guide on guest blogging is ranking inposition 3 for "links and guest." But hey, our target keyword is actually "guestblogging," so there's a good chance it's ranking lower than we'd like. So if I click on the keywords number here,you'll see that we're ranking in position 7 for our target query "guest blogging." Now, this page actually checks all the boxesthat we've gone through so far. 

It's been longer than 12 months since ourlast major update, it's targeting a meaningful keyword, and it's an underperforming page. Now, the last thing we need to do is makesure our subpar rankings aren't due to backlink-related factors. To do this, we need to find out how many backlinksthe top-ranking pages have and assess the quality of those links. So let's go to the SERP overview table inAhrefs' Keywords Explorer for this query. So, here you can see all ranking pages aswell as their SEO metrics. And the main metrics we're looking at arethe number of Referring Domains, which are unique websites that link to the page, DomainRating, which represents the overall strength of a website's backlink profile, and URL rating,which represents the overall strength of a page's backlink profile. 

So based on these metrics, our page has plentyof unique referring domains and high website authority, yet we're being outranked by otherso-called "weaker" pages. Now, we may not be able to rank in the first positionbecause of the sheer amount of links the page has, but a jump from position 7 to position 2 or 3could give us a decent bump in traffic for a topic that has a lot of business value for our company. And so therefore, this page could benefitfrom an update. We have a full video on assessing keywordand ranking difficulty, so I'll link that up for you in the description. Alright, so now that we've identified apage to update, it's time to refresh it. And this requires a bit of research and decision making. 

The first thing you'll want to do is assess searchintent and make sure your page matches it. Search intent means the reason behinda searchers query. And the best way to do this is to look atthe top-ranking pages and identify the 3 C's of search intent. The first C is content type. Content type can usually be categorized intoblog posts, product, category, and landing pages. So based on the SERP, these are all blog postsincluding ours. The second C is content format. And this applies more to blog posts and landing pages. 

A few common blog formats you'll see are how-tos,tutorials, list posts, and opinion editorials. For a landing page, that might be somethinglike a tool or a calculator. In this case, you'll see a mixture of "completeguides" and a couple "what is guest blogging" type posts. We've gone with the how-to format. And the third C is content angle. Content angle is often depicted in the titleas the "benefit." It's basically your hook as to why someoneshould click and who it's for. Based on the top-ranking pages, it looks likethe "ultimate guide" posts are hitting the angle of thoroughness.

 Whereas the "what is guest blogging" postsare targeting beginners. Ours on the other hand is actually targetingmore of an advanced audience. We've gone with the angle of building high-qualitylinks at scale, which probably isn't appealing or helpful for a beginner. So overall, our post matches search intentbut it also tells me that we're likely missing a lot of depth and context for a beginner-levelaudience; whom in my opinion are the ones searching for the query "guest blogging." Another interesting observation from thisSERP is that the "what is guest blogging" pages are actually ranking higher than themore authoritative pages with significantly fewer referring domains. So something to consider is that these pagesmay actually serve searcher intent better than the other pages. So if we were to update this page, we'd probablyinclude a short section on "What is Guest Blogging" within the content. 

Now, I want to illustrate my point on the importanceof matching search intent with an example. In November, 2018, we published a post targeting"what is seo." And the post was created as an expert roundupwhere we asked seasoned SEOs what search engine optimization meant to them. The post was great, but it didn't match search intent. As you can see from the SERP, these pagesare posts for beginners with basic information on the definition of SEO. As a result, our organic traffic growth fellshort of its full potential. We then updated the post on September 5th,2019 and almost immediately got a huge spike in traffic. And it continues to grow. 

So bottomline, if your page isn't perfectlymatching searcher intent, then your traffic and rankings will be limited. The next thing you need to do is analyze thetop-ranking relevant pages. Now, since we've already pinpointed that wehave a content issue rather than a links- or technical-related one, we need to see whatthe top ranking pages are doing right. So this would require you to manually visitthe pages and analyze key points that are being made. And you don't need to actually read everysingle post word for word. You just want to get an understanding ofstructure and key talking points. 

And because the majority of pages have gonewith the "complete guide" angle, I'll open up these three pages since that's the anglewe'd go with too. The easiest place to start is to look at headingtags because it'll tell you the main points that are discussed throughout the post. To speed up the process, you can use Ahrefs'SEO toolbar and use the on-page feature which is free for everyone. Just click the Page icon and you'll see alist of the main headings. Then do the same for the other pages. So I've put the headings in a Google Sheetand now we're just looking for similar topics that are covered by the top-ranking pages. 

So a couple of them talk about guest blogginggoals, they all talk about finding guest posts opportunities, preparing your pitch, writingthe actual post, and so on. So your typical step-by-step guide to guest blogging. And again, we'd probably include a section on "Whatis Guest Blogging," so I add that as a separate note. Alright, so this should give you a decentoutline to work with to write a great post. But there's one last thing that I think isworth doing. And that's to analyze the page's backlink profile. Since we're updating a page and we've ruledout that links aren't the reason for the page's underperformance, it's worth looking at thepage's backlinks to see why people linked to it. 

For example, if you have a post that includesstats and people linked to you because of that stat, generally speaking, you shouldinclude it in your updated post so the link stays relevant. Does this play a role in rankings? I can't say it does or it doesn't. But only good can come from it, assumingthe point is still valid, accurate, and up to date. Plus, if a lot of people are linking to youbecause of something you've mentioned, then it could lead to more links going forward. To see your backlink profile, go to Ahrefs'Site Explorer and enter the URL of the page you're updating. 

Next, go to the Backlinks report. From here, you can just skim through the listand look for unique reasons why people are linking to you. So as you can see here, we got a link fromEntrepreneur because of a stat mentioning 20%. And the link below that also talks about atraffic increase by 20%. So to quickly see how many links we gotbecause of this stat, I'll scroll back up and enter "20" into the Include box. And I'll also set the Search filter to onlylook in the surrounding text and link anchor. And there are nearly 60 unique pages thathave linked to this page because of that stat, so it's probably worth mentioning. 

Now, you don't have to include everythingyou find in the Backlinks report. Just do it if it's still relevant, adds value, andmakes sense with the context of your page. Alright, so after doing this, you should havea thorough outline of the key things to include in your content. The last step is to republish your post andsubmit it for reindexing. If you use a CMS like WordPress, change yourpublished date to the current date, and hit Update. After you can resubmit your URL in GoogleSearch Console and request reindexing. Just enter the URL in the search bar. And then hit the Request Indexing link. From my experience, Google recrawls the pagealmost immediately. 

So if you've done everything right and your pagematched all of the aforementioned requirements, you can sometimes see an immediate bump inrankings and traffic. Now, you don't have to actually request indexing,you can also wait for Google to recrawl the page which should have the same effect. So I encourage you to go and do a contentaudit of your site to see which pages could benefit from a full-blown update. 

And we have a full tutorial on doing a contentaudit as well as a free template that'll do the heavy lifting for you. So I'll leave a link to that in the description. Now, if you found this video to be helpful,make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. And if you have any questions, leave one inthe comments below. I'll see you in the next tutorial.