I wrote this post back in 2018 that I thought was really clever and useful, talking about how to integrate the power of SCRUM (a project management framework) into your everyday working life.

It bombed…hard.

in two years, I’ve had a total of 3 views of the post.

It turns out that my audience was not interested in the funny title “Scrum Love” and they probably didn’t even know what I was talking about, so was not interested in clicking on it

It was one of the posts I wrote around the time I started to carefully think about how to write my headlines and so there it sits on my site, not doing much and not seeing any more traffic.

I bet you’ve got posts on your website that are like this.

You spent hours writing them, got a little traffic after you shared it on your socials and with your list, but after that, it goes quiet, just like this:

Ideally you want posts that are re-visited again and again, either by Google or by your users so that you don’t see a decline in views…you see growth with your best performing posts like this one which makes up 10% of my total views on the site.

I wrote it only a week between the post above, but it has been consistent growth and visit again and again (see below).

I was able to achieve this growth because I checked the stats for my posts on a weekly basis and when a post started to do well (i.e. the title resonated with users and there was a good amount of time spent on the page), I took it and shared it as much as I could across social channels and email.

If it was already doing well then I helped it along essentially!

I used Buffer to schedule the same post 1-2 times a day in Twitter and traffic to it started to grow.

Google has full access to the Twitter content stream so Tweets are crawled and ranked and I think this helped a lot in getting the post taken seriously by Google when users were searching for questions about “digital marketing strategies for small business”.

It was also a title that answered a question, so I think that really helped it along in those beginning stages.

After 2 months of doing this, I then rewrote the post, adding in links to external sources, linking to new internal posts and adding a new introductory text.

This is a really important exercise to do with your most important posts as many of your new readers might not have seen it before.

It also tells Google that there’s something new about the post and build trust for the user

See this screenshot of search results for “blogging help”. Articles dated 2020 show up on the first page, not article from 2017.

New and relevant content is what feeds Google and this includes republishing old, well -performing posts.

I went back to the post again 6 months later and added an email sign-up form to it, which helped to grow my list and finds leads and I still continue to tinker and play around with it to this day.

It’s popularity with Google has meant that my overall visibility increased over time>

…and the site was being shown in results for keywords that I would love to be number 1 for.

They’re not being clicked as much as I want (but that’s for another post about writing compelling headlines) but it shows that Google thinks the site and it’s content is good enough to show in search results:

You can do this by checking on the Behavior > Site Content > All Page report in Google Analytics on a regular basis and noting what posts have a long ‘Avg Time on Page’. A long time spent on that post denotes that your post was engaging enough to read:

Then take that post and give it a content refresh or update and new internal links…or get them to sign-up to your email list using a lead magnet.

Not doing anything means that as you start to get that traffic land direct on that page via Search, you’ll lose them (like what happened to me in the beginning) and it will be waste of possibly finding a potential lead as you’re not giving them anything to do once they have got to the bottom of your post.

It’s time that I updated some of the best performing content on this blog and will be doing that this week.
What will you do to revive old, but good performing blogs on your site today?