4 Ways To Improve the Ranking of Old Pages

Almost everything that’s old has the potential to make a resurgence. Classic cars, vintage clothes and retro music all have become popular again, and so can old web pages. Surely you’ve had a few high-ranking web pages that consistently appeared in top search engine results. But over time, those rankings may get worse if you neglect the pages. Lucky for you, there are several things you can do to make those old pages popular again. This helps you make the most of previous content and cuts down on extra content marketing work. Inspired by marketing guru Neil Patel, here are four tips to get you started.

1. Fix and Optimize All Your Links

One way to bring your ranking back up is to look at redoing your links. Start by adding new internal links on the page. For example, you can add links throughout the page to other popular pages on your site. This can help improve the strength of your entire site and bring more people to the page.

Also, if you have links on your site that are simply leading users to 404 pages, why not make those pages work for you? Send users not to error pages but to the page that you’re trying to increase traffic to.

Lastly, give readers ample ways to find your page. Try putting a link from the home page or considering another element like an attention grabber bar at the top of all website pages with a link to the page you want to promote. While you’re doing all this, make sure that any previous links on the page work correctly. Nothing says out-of-date like links that lead nowhere.

2. Refresh Content as Needed

Vintage clothes, cars and music aren’t always just popular as is. When people add a modern twist to these trends, they become even more successful. The same goes for your web pages. If parts of a page are out of date or no longer relevant, you may need to do more writing work to make the page interesting to readers again. By frequently changing the content of the page, you can also improve your rankings, because search engines may place more value on frequently updated content.

Refresh content and add more value to your pages by compiling a list of resources. This is another way to improve rankings. The more helpful and reliable a page becomes, the more likely you are to get other sites to link to you.

3. Take Stock of Your Keywords

If you didn’t think about keywords when you first created a page, take the time to decide on popular keywords and add them to your page. Also, don’t just confine those keywords to one page. Adding them to multiple pages will improve the site as a whole. If you had keywords to begin with, you might want to look at how well they are performing for your overall content marketing strategy and consider trying different ones. Consider updating these from time to time or testing different keywords to find the ones that bring in the most visitors.

4. Get Back Out There

One reason pages get less popular is that people usually promote them less as time passes. But if you want those pages to rank again, you’ll need to get as gung-ho about promotion as you were when you first published the page. Send posts out to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and any of your other social networks. You can also send out posts through email to bring in more views, encourage increased shares and help raise page rankings. Any other promotion techniques you used initially can be helpful to make your old posts new again. If advertising worked in the beginning, try that. If guest blogging helped bring people to your target page, that could work again.

While re-promoting the page via social media may get you an increase in social shares, the people who share the page might not necessarily have a lot of social influence. Take the time to tap your network and find influential people who can help share the page with all of the people who follow them. Doing this exposes you to exponentially more people than you could reach on your own.

When a page’s ranking drops, that’s not the end of the story. There are real ways to bring it back to the top of the list and in front of your ideal audience, including working to update links, refresh content and re-promote your pages. Try these tips on your own site and let us know how it works.