By identifying all the web content we wish was performing better in our “Is My Content Working” article, we’re ready to take steps towards getting all our precious content the traffic it deserves! There is a process, or almost a checklist, to making sure we do this right. Ultimately, reoptimizing the content takes about half as long as it takes to write the content from scratch. Keep this in mind when deciding what content to reoptimize and whether you think it’s worth the effort. In general, you shouldn’t have any reason to reoptimize content with the following qualities:

  • Something heavily reliant on time (current events)
  • Company news
  • A topic that has changed completely either legally, politically, or culturally
  • Hyper-niche or overly-esoteric in nature

Sometimes, topics that we write about simply garner minimal interest online. On occasion, the topic is so broad that hundreds – if not thousands – of articles have already been written about it. This greatly reduces the chances that people will see and engage with the article.

After you’ve identified the pages you want to give another shot, the process goes like this:

  • Ensuring the page is indexed and in the sitemap (crawlable) – NOT “No Index No Follow”
  • Ensuring the page meets a decent word count and isn’t plagiarized (over 400 words of content is preferable)
  • Ensuring the page includes proper meta-information (keyword-rich meta information rather than a repetition of the blog or page title)
  • Has some references internally and externally in the form of links

Let’s take a blog I did some time ago that I was confident should have pulled in some traffic:

/tips-get-reviews-customers-business-online/ 1

Though this is certainly a common topic, surely, we could get more than one visitor by making this article a little more unique?

https://www.marketmymarket.com/tips-get-reviews-customers-business-online/ – 760 words, indexed properly:

Doing a search in quotations via Google is one of quickest ways to know if a particular page is being indexed.  

This article passed Copyscape and has good internal/external linking. The only thing that is the meta information:

<title>Getting Reviews From Customers For Your Business – Market My Market</title>

Technically, there doesn’t appear to be a description. Is it that much of a make or break? Not really, but it could be enough to start nudging the article in the right direction.

“Top Ways Businesses get Reviews”
“Easy Ways to Get Customer/Client Reviews”
“Best Ways to Get Business Reviews From Clients/Customers”

These variations are likely more helpful. And of course, a description.

“Market My Market discusses some of the easiest and helpful methods of getting positive customer reviews for your business.”

Let’s do another example:

/marketing-conferences-worth/ 1

With the main title “Are Marketing Conferences Worth it?”  my Forbes article – on which the blog was heavily based – comes up in the top two results. Figuring out what is holding this article back may be a no-brainer – the content itself wasn’t original enough to receive better visibility.

/lawyers-that-show-up-on-maps-outside-of-their-main-category/ 1

While this is a substantive article about a niche topic, that’s the issue – it is almost too specific to its audience:

https://www.marketmymarket.com/lawyers-that-show-up-on-maps-outside-of-their-main-category/

The article discusses how lawyers show up on maps for categories besides their main practice area.  This article would certainly go beyond the hyper-niche prerequisite I stated and is more useful if shared within an e-mail campaign or newsletter.  

After putting so much time into researching and writing quality content, it helps to regularly check on the content’s performance to ensure that it is engaging the right audience. If not, these tips will help you strengthen your content so that it can achieve its goal. At Market My Market, we regularly refresh content for a variety of clients to boost their performance. Whether you need help with blogging, PPC, SMM, email marketing, web development, or other digital marketing venture, we’re ready to take you to the next level. Contact us for a free marketing quote.