Good old instant gratification. It’s great for the short term, but not always so great for the long term. Most good strategies for increasing your website traffic organically don’t tend to satisfy those looking for fast results, but here’s some good news: There is a way to grow your website traffic and still be get (almost) instant results, so long as you have a little something in your back pocket to work with. Keep reading to find out what it is, and how the strategy works.
How It All Started: Watching Our High Performers Slip
About two years after we started creating content for one of our clients, we noticed a trend—visits to formerly high-performing blog posts had started to drop. But it wasn’t an easy trend to spot. Their new content was doing well, and things looked pretty good from a birds’ eye view. To get a better handle on the problem, we went page-by-page through their blog posts. That’s when we found that, on average, visits started trending downward for posts that had previously ranked very well after 18-24 months
If you’re not paying attention to individual posts, this is bound to happen to you. Growth looks steady overall, but your best older posts may be dropping considerably—and weighing on your overall growth.
What We Did About it
To stop this downward trend, we did two things over a two-month period:
- We audited the client’s existing blog posts and noted which older posts were slipping fast. We identified seven previously high performers that needed help.
- We rewrote/revised all seven of them.
The Audit Process
We use this spreadsheet to audit blog posts, both for this client (all our clients, actually) and for our own work. It’s easy and quick to complete, and makes the audit process painless. Details on how to use it are included in the spreadsheet.
The Rewriting Process
Based on the audit, we then rewrote or added new sections to the seven articles, and then republished them with new dates.
Here’s how to do this with your existing blogs:
- If an article is outdated, rewrite it.
- If it isn’t outdated and still useful, refresh it by adding new content where necessary.
- Then republish the article to the same URL with the new date.
Voila! This method worked for the client in this example (you can take a look at the results below), and it has worked without fail for all our clients.
The Results
Here’s a look at actual client data after a two-month period before and after republishing:
| Blog Post | Re-post date | 2 months prior | 2 months after | Difference | % Difference |
| Blog Post A | 9/26/2017 | 5539 | 7286 | 1747 | 31.54% |
| Blog Post B | 9/19/2017 | 1779 | 4733 | 2954 | 166.05% |
| Blog Post C | 9/12/2017 | 11121 | 19137 | 8016 | 72.08% |
| Blog Post D | 8/3/2017 | 48254 | 56457 | 8203 | 17.00% |
| Blog Post E | 10/10/2017 | 2675 | 5031 | 2356 | 88.07% |
| Blog Post F | 8/21/2017 | 855 | 1554 | 699 | 81.75% |
| Blog Post G | 9/19/2017 | 1779 | 4733 | 2954 | 166.05% |
| Total |
|
72002 | 98931 | 26929 | 37% |
Some trends we noticed with these blog posts:
- Each of these articles peaked somewhere between six and 20 months of the original posting.
- Each and every blog post started to decline at the 20-month mark at the latest.
- Each has returned to the pace they were at during the peak; six of the seven have surpassed the previous monthly visit record (the seventh is less than 400 visits from beating the previous record).
- For the most part, these were “micro” slips in keyword rankings. For example, a high-volume keyword may have slipped from spot two to five in Google (hard to notice, but a huge difference), or from spot eight to 11 (page one to page two—probably an even bigger difference). In other words, keywords didn’t drop out of the rankings altogether. Plus, the change was slow, and took place two years after publishing, and over the space of a few months. That's hard to catch!
The result: After rewriting these seven existing blogs, our client got 26,929 more visits over a two-month period. That’s a 37% increase in organic website traffic!
You can do this, too!
How To Increase Website Traffic Easily & Quickly Using Blog Posts You Already Have
As I mentioned, it’s difficult to see on a page-by-page level what posts are growing and which are tanking. However, you must stay on top of old posts, because they’re typically going to be your best performers. If you’ve been doing inbound marketing for a couple years and aren’t doing this, some of your best content may be flatlining, costing you traffic, leads, and potentially the right clients for your company.
The good news is that simply auditing and rewriting your blog posts can drastically change the equation.
This DIY Blog Lead Analysis Template shows you, step-by-step, how to statistically find which posts need to be rewritten to return them to their former glory.
It’s the exact method we use to identify underperforming posts for our clients (we use it in our own marketing, too). It takes about three minutes to run it, and it can help you boost your website traffic by huge numbers—without creating any content from scratch.
Click here to download it for free, and see if it can help revive some of your best-performing posts that may have gone by the wayside.
