Watch the video now to learn how to get more traffic from your old website content.
Transcription
Hi, this is John Lincoln with ignite visibility. And today I am going to talk to you about how to get rid of legacy, old pages on your website that are not doing anything for you, how to teach you how to take those and maximize them so that you are driving more traffic to the pages that you care about. And as a result, you are lifting the overall authority and traffic levels on your entire website [music]. Okay, so what I am talking about here today is basically, you have got all these old posts, right? Maybe it is a legacy website; you have got old WebPages, you have got old blog posts. And these things have been optimized for terms that are competing with the rest of your site. Maybe these pages are thin content, meaning they only have a hundred words or less, or a couple hundred words, and they are not really substantial.
They are not long form content; they do not have what it takes to rank really well, inside of Google today. They do not have what it takes, to drive social media traffic; they do not have what it takes to be really a top tier piece of content on your website. So, the first thing we want to do, is kind of talk about the method, to evaluate what pages are good and what pages are bad, so that is the first thing I am going to jump into first, after that I am going to teach you, how to deal with these pages and then what the end result will look like for you. So, the first thing is evaluating your site and trying to find out where these pages are. So the first thing you can do is go inside of Google analytics and set a filter and find all the pages on your site that are not driving any traffic.
They have not driven any traffic for you, for the last 6 months or so. If that is the case and they are not driving any traffic, from social media, they are not driving any traffic, from Google, and just in general, there is no traffic coming in, you are going to know, that these are poor performing posts. In addition to that, you are going to want to look at tools like, SEMRush, and see are those posts ranking for anything, are these pages ranking for anything? If they are then you might want to put those into one bucket. If they are not ranking for anything, then put them into another bucket. And then finally, use a tool like Ahrefs or Majestic, to find out if any of these pages, have links to them.
If they do have links to them, make sure you put them into another bucket, because that means that they are going to have some complications, for our next step. Okay, now you kind of know, what posts are not getting any traffic, you know posts that are not ranking for anything, you know which posts do not any have links. So, those posts generally are going to be ones that, you are going to want to deal with, right? And essentially, what your options are, with all these posts, is that you have the option to one, 404 the page, you have the option to two, redirect the page, or you have the option of three, repurpose the page, meaning that you are going to be kind of trying to give it new life.
So, let us talk about 404ing the page, so if there is one or a hundred or thousands of pages, they have zero value, and there is not really a place that really makes sense to redirect them, meaning they are not really optimized for a keyword, they do not have any links pointing at them, they do not have any traffic coming in, there is no authority. In some cases, there is no real need to 301redirect those pages. You can just 404 them, and you have gotten rid of a large amount of pages on your site that were thin content, that basically the search engine looks at it and says, “Okay, these are really thin pages, the rest of the website’s quality, but these are kind of weighing you down.” So, those 404s will be helpful to get rid of that.
Your secondary option is to 301 redirect them. So, if these pages have some really low rankings, or if they have some external links to them, or a little bit of traffic, in those cases, you are going to want to 301 redirect those pages, to the page that you want to rank the highest for the terms that you are going after, the term or terms.
So, that is how you deal with those. Now finally, if have got pages that used to rank well, for some things, and they are on maybe the second or third page at Google or something like that, that is an excellent opportunity to go in, refresh those pages, do a new keyboard assignment, maybe add some video, some optimized images, fresh schema.org, everything that you can think about to pack into that page to make it, so that it is a quality piece of content. Republish that page, do some marketing for that page, get it back out there again, so that you can get that to be ranking where it was before, and you can start getting some fresh traffic again.
So, through this method, what is going to happen is, you are going to get rid of all these bad pages on your site, you are going to refresh pages that used to rank, you are going to redirect pages that are not doing anything for you, and transfer authority to pages that you want to rank, that might have been competing with, these other pages, right? So overall, by kind of pruning your site in a way, as if it is a tree or something, that you want to give new life to, it is going to make it so that each of those individual pages rank better, these other pages you get rid of, and the overall website, starts to grow better inside of the search engines.
So, this is a great process, one that we have done, for a lot of clients and I highly recommend that you do it for yourself. It can be a lot of work, but the payoff is going to be big, not only for your individual posts, but for the website as a whole. Okay, so that is it for today, hope you have learned something, and good luck with getting rid of those old posts, repurposing old posts, and dealing with those redirects, and making your old, legacy site like new again. See you for the next Ignite Visibility University soon. [music]
