“Unlock Your Blog’s Potential: 7 Secrets to Skyrocket Your Success in the New Year!”
Here’s how to find and fix your underperforming content:
- Identify under performing content – You need to know what’s not performing. Google Search Console (GSC) is a good source of data for this. Go to Search Results, then click Date. Select Compare & specify which dates you want to compare by. Below the graph, select Pages, then rank the list of pages by Clicks Difference. You need to see the biggest drops at the top. Make note of average positions as well.
- Re-evaluate your keyword choice – Next, you need to check which keywords you should be optimizing your content for. You can order the keywords by clicks, impressions or a few other metrics. Given that the content is underperforming, impressions will be the most useful. Also, be sure to consider your average rank. It’s also important to use this step to understand whether it’s worth bothering to proceed with the remaining steps. Some topics just won’t get traffic or rankings. Also, even if you think you know which keywords matter, check again. The queries people search for change over time.
- Analyze your competitors – Use Frase to pull in data from your competitors. They offer a free trial so you can try this out easily. This research will help you understand what kind of content is ranking. That matters. You may have to dig a bit deeper and read through some articles.
- Improve your content – Now you’ve analyzed your competitors, you should have a better idea of what changes you’ll need to make to improve your content. Frase will have given you ideas on stats and additional topics to discuss. Use those. And look for other ways to improve your content, such as changes to formatting, and refreshing facts/data.
- Re-optimize your content. Modern content optimization tools like Frase provide suggestions on which phrases to incorporate into your content. They give you a score from 1-100 and allow you to benchmark against the competition. We do this with all of our content and it definitely helps. The key is to avoid optimizing too much. If you’re getting scores in the 90s, dial it back. Aim for just above what the competition is doing. Above all else, make sure your content still flows naturally.
- Bump the post to the front of your blog – Change the publication date of your article to today’s date to get it to the top of your blog. This will help drive extra traffic to the article and encourage Google (and other search engines) to index your changes.
- Promote the post like you would any new post – Promoting your post is critical but a quick share on Twitter/X is not enough. You need to promote it properly. If you’ve mentioned brands, tag them on social to encourage them to reshare it. If you have contacts at those brands, reach out and ask them to help promote it. Ideally, you should be working through a checklist each time you promote a blog post.
- Add some extra internal links with secondary keywords – This is a step in my own promotional checklist but I wanted to mention it specifically. Internal links are a great way to give an article a quick boost. But you shouldn’t overuse the same anchors. So, vary your anchor text using secondary keywords.
- Acquire some high quality links for an added boost – This is an optional step which requires the most effort. I recommend it for highly competitive terms but you may want to see how things go with the previous steps first. We learned in Google’s May 2024 algo leak that backlinks are still incredibly important. Links from pages that get traffic are the most important. The quickest way to acquire links will be to reach out to contacts in your niche and ask them for a link. Alternatively, run a quick blogger outreach campaign.
Sometimes seemingly minor tweaks can help. For example, Google usually indexes new Blogging Wizard articles in 30 minutes. One article didn’t get picked up at all, even months after publication.
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