SEO for Older Websites (3+ years old)
Last week I did a post on how to start doing SEO on a new site and this week I’m juxtaposing that blog post with this one: doing SEO on older sites (3+ years old).
Listen to this episode here:
Although all sites have a specific amount of time they’ve been online, when I mention age here, also take into account how intentional you’ve been with your blog writing and SEO.
Have you specifically picked and used new keywords? Have you looked at your Google Analytics data? Have you thought about the experience you want people to have when they first find your site?
You could have a site that is over 5 years old and barely attracting any traffic, vs. a 3 year old site that you’ve worked on very consciously, that is brining over 10K visits per month.
To quantify this blog post and podcast episode, I decided to give it a specific number of anything over 3 years but I’d say the 3 - 5 year range is good here. In the future, I might do another episode about even older sites and what it means to them to do SEO.
Why is the SEO strategy different for old sites vs. new sites?
The reason why the strategy is a bit different for older sites vs. new sites is you have more data to work with and more information to inform your content.
When you are starting out, there is a lot of experimentation that goes on...lots of trying things and seeing how it feels and how your audience responds.
To be honest, this experimentation is ongoing (I think this mindset is what makes people really successful in the long run) but this is something you may be paying even more attention to at the beginning.
Once your site has been up for awhile, it’s easier to replicate past successes and feel more confident about where you want to take your website.
As always, the pre-step here is setting up your Search Console + Google Analytics! . Having these tools and started to warm yourself up to the data will be a game-changer (I promise!)
Here are the 3 steps outline (plus one bonus step):
Understand what content is already performing well
Clean up the technical errors on the site
Remove any old pages that aren’t doing anything for your traffic
Bonus: Build a backlinking strategy
Let’s dive in!
Step 1) Understanding what content is already performing well
You can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you are right now. It reminds me of those mall maps and you can’t find the “You’re Here” sticker and it drives you crazy. It seems pretty impossible to make progress when you don’t have awareness of your present location.
Same thing goes with SEO and building a content strategy: where are you now and what content is already performing well?
The key tools I recommend here are the Search Console (looking at your “Performance” Reporting) and Google Analytics (use the “Landing Pages report”). They will look something like this:
Search Console - Performance Report
Search Console Performance Reporting
Google Analytics - Landing Pages Report
Here are some questions to answer in the Search Console “Performance”:
What are you top 5 keywords? Click into each one and click on the “Pages” part of the Search Console to identify the blog post(s) that are attracting that keyword traffic
Use the “Position” Metric to identify which page you are ranking for each keyword (1 - 10 is page 1 , 10 - 20 page 2, etc.)
Here are some questions to answer in Google Analytics “Landing Pages” report:
What are the top 5 landing pages?
What bounce rate do they each have?
What calls to actions do each of these posts have?
Just having this awareness can help you start to get a sense of what is working for you right now on your website.
Once you have this awareness, here are some steps you can take:
Take time to optimize/improve old blog posts that you know are attracting traffic and will actually have a return from your efforts
Decide if you want to create any additional blog content based off the topic that are already popular. Maybe your audience wants to see a sequel post or maybe they’d love for you to add more information to the existing post.
When you know what is already doing well, there is so much more motivation to spend time on your blog because you know people are finding you on Google!
Step 2) Clean up all technical errors on the site
If you aren’t a Web Developer, then technical errors on your site probably don’t turn you on in any way. But having a “clean” site will improve your ranking.
Imagine being invited to a friends house who just bought a beautiful new chandelier. You are excited to see it but as you open their front door, you are shocked to see a dusty rubble of chairs, wallpaper hanging off the walls, and dirty floors. The new chandelier looks great but it is hard to appreciate with the rest of the house in shambles.
If we take this lovely analogy to your website, you can publish all the beautiful blog posts you want but if your site is taking forever to load, has a gazillion options in the navigation, and is just not pleasant to click around on, people will leave very quickly.
The two most important things to watch out for are redirects and 404 errors. Redirects aren’t bad in principle, but make sure you aren’t unnecessary redirecting from one page to another. Too many of these can make your site slow and Google will notice.
404 errors are when an old page changes URL and so it no longer exists. Again, in principle 404 errors aren’t evil and they happen on any living and breathing website. What is important to remember is to try not to change page URLs once the page is created and use redirects if sparingly. Also, customizing your 404 page is a nice way to invite people to stay on your site even they got lost finding a page.
Neil Patel has a great SEO audit tool here: https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/
You can use it to do an initial review of your site. My Soar package also does an in-depth audit review here.
Action steps for cleaning up the Technical parts of your site:
Review your site 404 errors and redirects
Check out your site speed. Here are some tools:
Work with a Web Developer or SEO expert to get these issues fixed
Step 3) Remove any old pages that aren’t doing anything for your traffic
This one might feel counterintuitive to you but it follows the old “less is more” tenant.
Google (and the humans) want to understand what your site is about and if you have blog posts about widely different topics, it’s confusing and will muddle up your ranking.
When you remove pages about old topics that have nothing to do with your current business or website, it allows for a cleaner overall site concept to improve your ranking.
Warning: removing pages should be done with caution and accompanied but an active content plan (as in you are creating blog content consistently). Once pages are removed, your overall site traffic should be monitored to review any fluctuations.
The first step to this process is using Google Analytics to export your Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages report and use Excel to filter all pages that are getting 0 traffic. You don’t need to be an Excel whiz but knowing how to filter might take a couple Google searches.
Once you have a list of pages, go through the list and confirm that these are pages you are comfortable removing.
This may also be a great time to build a “Content Vault” or a document that lists out all the content you’ve created. I’ve seen clients use Wordpress or their CMS to organize all their content and it isn’t the ideal situation. Instead, if you have a spreadsheet with all your content, you can easily filter and find content to reshare.
From an SEO perspective, you can also identify your top 5 players, the ones that are bringing in the most traffic and what keywords they are targeting. Having this high level view helps bring together a more solid strategy with your SEO and integrating it into the rest of your marketing.
Last step is to actually delete the pages you’ve identified as a) getting 0 traffic and b) not relevant to your brand/website/business anymore. Before deleting, save the content somewhere in case you want to reuse it again the future.
Monitoring your traffic after making any of these changes is key to understand what changes worked positively or negatively. Awareness is always a key component to a thriving SEO strategy.
Something else that might come out of this is that instead of deleting pages, you may repurpose or combine two blog posts. Maybe you decide to use the blog post for a freebie opt-in or part of an email sequence.
Again, having full awareness of the full body of content that you’ve created for your website can really open your eyes to all the possible ways your content is serving your business. And also making sure that each piece is contributing to healthy traffic by having a clear theme and topics.
Actions steps for removing old pages:
Use Google Analytics + Excel to filter out pages that aren’t attracting any traffic
Review each page to make sure it isn’t actually relevant
Delete pages and monitor ranking over the next few weeks
Bonus : 4) Build a backlinking strategy
There is so much I could say about backlinking but what is important to note is that after hitting publish on a new blog post, taking the extra steps to get new content out there can speed up the traffic growth process.
One of the several things that is part of a backlinking strategy is pitching other communities (where you know your ideal audience hangs out) and getting featured.
Backlinking opportunities could be:
Guest Posting
Podcasting
News Sites
Link Roundups
At the end of the day, this is all about relationship building and being committed to helping other leaders educate their communities about what they do.
From an SEO perspective, getting other sites to link back to your site can help Google see your site as an authority and send you quality traffic.
First you can go back and check if all the past interviews you did have correct backlinks pointing to your site. And now going forward, create a little publicity packet to have ready for your next podcast interview or guest feature. This way, you already have planned exactly what you want to share and how you will bring value to the community that features you.
That is it my friends! I’d love to know in the comments where you are at right now when it comes to your own SEO strategy.
And if you are looking for extra support with your SEO, check out the Soar package! This is the fastest way to get SEO results without going into burnout or overwhelm.