This week we are featuring a guest blog by Laura Estes, our MSP Marketing & Sales enablement Consultant.

I am sure you are familiar with the term “dog years.” If not, they say that one year for a dog feels equivalent to living seven years. Well, it turns out that the internet has its own kind of accelerated aging: Moz reports that three months is roughly equal to one “Internet Year.” You may think “okay, this blog is just a year old;” well, in internet years that blog is four years old! Would you find a four-year-old blog to be credible? Unlikely. And neither will your readers. 

So, if you are looking to increase your web traffic and boost your SEO, it is time to relaunch some content! Steps for your content relaunch:

1. Identify underperforming content
2. Improve and update that content
3. Republish your post

There are a few basic items you can do to quickly optimize and update:

• Be sure to take out any dates and avoid using them in the future to keep content evergreen.
• If you must cite a statistic, do some research and find more recent data.
  Add in more detail and updated information (see above).
• If your target audience has changed, switch up content to better speak to your readers.
• Test all in-text links and CTAs. Do they still work? Should the link redirect to a different page? While you’re at it, confirm that your CTA is action-oriented.
• Use subheadings to break down and reorganize the article. By using more headings, bullets, blockquotes and lists, you can increase your time on site by 17.8%.
• Finally, wrap up the content with a summary. This summary will make it more engaging for the user to read and helps send home the purpose of a product, etc if the reader doesn’t have time to dissect a lengthy e-guide. By writing a conclusion and clearly labeling it, you’ll get more people to scroll to the bottom of your blog post, increasing your scroll-ability by up to 10%.
• You can also end with a question prompting further engagement with your content! This is particularly useful if you share this blog on social media. Visitors can easily engage via comments on your social media channels.

Another great way to update existing content is to take vendor content a step further and customize it to fit your brand’s voice. Here’s how:

• Write in conversational tones by using the words “you” and “I”
• Keep paragraphs short (5-6 lines). White space keeps the content more manageable for the visitor to read
• Add in new or updated images, video, and audio to make the text easier to digest and to add further context to what may be a fairly technical article
• Just like before, be sure to wrap up the content with a summary

Summary
Updating blog content is crucial for increasing your web traffic. While it may seem like a daunting project, it’s worth it! Remember, keep it evergreen. Update statistics where necessary and avoid dates when possible. Write in short, personable paragraphs to make the content manageable to comprehend. Happy updating!

Still looking for more content? Check out our content packages at www.shop.mindmatrix.net. Designed especially for MSPs, these Content Packages target very specific MSP-IT customer profiles making for tailored, engaging MSP-IT marketing and sales content. Priced between $50-100 a month, the content packages offer 100 whitepapers, 120 emails, 25 postcards, 15 landing pages, 12 brochures, 2000 social media posts and 150 blog posts. The content spans a range of diverse topics that are of relevance across multiple industry verticals and is also updated every month to ensure it stays fresh. And you have the complete authority to edit the content you purchase and use it as you wish. Please visit the link to learn more.

Laura Estes is a Marketing and Sales Enablement Consultant at Mindmatrix. Which draws her strong background in content creation, social media, digital marketing and communication skills.