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13 Tips for More Traffic

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13 Tips for More Traffic

For nonprofits and charities, every penny counts. And so does every source of traffic to their websites, including organic traffic from search engines like Google. So what can these organizations do to increase the influx of visitors (and hopefully donors) arriving through that channel? Of course, the answer is to step up their SEO game.

In this article, we’ll cover some definitions, free tools, and 13 SEO tips. You don’t need to be an SEO veteran to apply these tips. Nor do you need to be in the business of generating tons of content like Wikipedia to get people through your door. Ready? Here we go:

What is SEO for nonprofits?

Search engine optimization (SEO) for nonprofits and charities is the process of optimizing websites to increase visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people look for information related to that organization’s cause, e.g., volunteering, fundraising, events, education, etc.

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Basic tools (which are free)

To implement the tips featured in this article, you’ll need a couple of free tools. But don’t hurry to get them now. You can do it later once you choose the tips that you want to use.

  • Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – AWT is our free tool that allows you to improve your website’s SEO performance and get more traffic from search. AWT can show you information like all known keywords your site ranks for, show all backlinks, and perform technical audits automatically, among other things.
  • A keyword research tool – Some free ones are Ahrefs’ free keyword generator, Keyword Surfer, or Google Keyword Planner.
  • Google with search operators – In case you haven’t had the occasion to use those, search operators allow for customizing search results. For example, you can tell Google to only show mentions of your organization on a particular website.

Now that we know what tools to use, let’s look at 13 actionable tips that can boost traffic.

1. Keep your website user friendly and in good SEO health

First things first. Let’s talk about your website’s technical fundamentals. They may need a little work. But if you don’t get them in order first, you risk undermining your SEO efforts in the long run.

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I’m talking about things like issues with crawling and indexing, missing meta tags, slow loading times, and practices that result in bad user experiences (e.g., pop-ups). It happens to everyone, businesses and nonprofits alike.

So before you implement any other SEO tips, do these five things:

  1. Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to monitor your website’s SEO health – This tool will regularly monitor your website for over 100 SEO health issues. All you need to do is fix the issues that AWT brings to your attention.
  2. Get rid of pop-ups – Or at least most of your pop-ups. These include sign-up forms, exit forms, etc. Do the same for any banners that shift the layout.
  3. Make sure your website’s layout is clear, consistent, and usable
  4. Optimize your website for mobile devices – Over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. On top of that, Google indexes and ranks content based on mobile versions of the websites (mobile-first indexing).
  5. Optimize your website for Core Web Vitals 

Pro tip

For checking multiple webpages’ speed at scale, you can use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools too. Apart from showing metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB), it also supports Core Web Vitals.

Pie charts showing data on metrics like TTFB, CWV, etc

The numbers in blue next to the metrics will direct you to exact pages within a certain category. This way, you will know which pages need attention.

Recommended reading: The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO

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2.  Get listed in directories and articles about nonprofit organizations

Keywords related to nonprofits and charities can be extremely competitive.

In times like these, your best chance to be somehow included in that top 10 is to get listed on the pages that rank.

So if there’s a list of charities ranking in the top 10, that may be your best chance to get a piece of that search demand. 

SERP overview for "non profit organization"

Notice any nonprofit organizations you know here? Exactly. Most of the search results for the query “non profit organization” are lists and directories of organizations. As shown above, they are super hard to outrank.

Moreover, that may be your best shot at credibility. In this case, if the search intent suggests that people are looking for a list of nonprofit organizations, a “nonpartisan” result is likely more credible.

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But there’s more to that tactic. Yes, you will get visibility and traffic. But if the site that is going to feature you also links to your website, that will be a new backlink for you. And each additional site that chooses to do things similarly will, of course, give you another backlink.

Why do you need backlinks? Because backlinks are still one of the strongest ranking factors. Generally, the more backlinks a page gets, the higher it ranks and the more traffic it gets (study).

You will be able to see all links pointing to your site using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

3. Look for unlinked mentions of your organization (and turn them into links)

Nonprofits and charities commonly use PR. Hence, they get a lot of coverage from the media and partners. Interestingly enough, that tactic can bring SEO benefits too if the organization’s mentions are turned to links. Of course, that is not always the case:

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Forbes article showing unlinked mentions of WWF

You can find mentions of your organization using Google with the help of search operators. That’s exactly how I found the example above.

Google SERP for WWF mentions on Forbes with search operators applied

Of course, you can search the entire indexed internet for any mentions of your organization in any form.

Google SERP for "wwf" or "world wildlife fund" with search operators applied

The above query goes like this: wwf OR “world wildlife fund” ‑site:wwf.* ‑site:worldwildlife.* This basically means “show me pages that include ‘wwf’ or ‘world wildlife fund’ but exclude any site that starts with ‘wwf’ or ‘worldwildlife.’”

Finding mentions is the first step in the process. You still need to filter those results for unlinked mentions. We cover the entire process of finding unlinked mentions for any site in this tutorial.

Once you find your link opportunities, you need to reach out to the authors or site owners and simply ask them to link to you.

Naturally, the best way to get linked mentions is to ask for them upfront. A small “detail” like this can easily get overlooked in the heat of a PR campaign. Thus, it’s a good idea to include a mention of that in your standard operating procedures.

4. Answer journalists’ requests

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Media coverage is the lifeblood of nonprofit organizations. Naturally, it increases brand awareness and shapes PR. And if that coverage is online, it can also help improve rankings on search engines.

For this tip, I want to focus on a well-known SEO tactic: answering journalist requests on sites like HARO, ResponseSource, ProfNet, or SourceBottle. Additionally, you can scan Twitter for hashtags like #journorequest.

The idea is simple:

  1. Sign up for one of the services mentioned above. Don’t forget to subscribe to the type of requests you want to get.
  2. Answer requests that relate to topics you are an expert on as soon as possible.
  3. If a journalist chooses your pitch, you’ll be quoted in their text and will most probably get a link to your organization.

Why is this tactic effective for SEO? Because links from the media will usually be some of the most authoritative backlinks you can build to your site.

Site Explorer overview showing Forbes has high UR and DR

While services like HARO make the connection between journalists and sources easier, there is another side of that coin: Journalists get a lot of pitches. It can be quite hard to break through. To increase your chances of being picked by journos, we’ve got just the right guide: How to Build Backlinks and Get Press Using HARO [Case Study]. 

5. Do guest blogging to earn links

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This tip is another way to build backlinks and get more visibility while you’re at it.

Guest blogging is about contributing guest articles on third-party websites (not only blogs). And it’s all over the internet. Here’s an example guest article from the American Nurses Association:

Excerpt of American Nurses Association article; picture of healthcare worker in PPE

Whether you’re going to pitch articles for links or for the ability to get in front of somebody else’s audience, that’s entirely up to you. Guest blogging is good for both. However you want to approach it, just remember one thing: aim for high-quality websites.

Finding guest blogging opportunities can be as easy as plugging into Google “[your topic] ‘write for us’” or “[your topic] ‘guest post.’” But if you want to go pro and find these opportunities at scale (plus effectively filter them), see how we do it in this tutorial.

6. Go after educational keywords related to your cause

Here’s a great illustration of this tip. It’s called “Top 10 Facts About Pandas,” and it’s an article from WWF.

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This is how it looks on the front side of things:

Excerpt of WWF article on 10 facts about pandas; picture of panda resting on a rock with lush greenery as a backdrop

Ten interesting facts, 10 absolutely cute pictures, and a call to action: adopt a panda.

And here’s what’s happening under the hood—tons of organic traffic each month:

With this article about pandas, WWF targeted an educational keyword to leverage the search potential of this topic—this is what drives all that organic traffic you see above. Notice the “call to action” button at the top? From 10 facts about pandas to adopting a panda, those are clever ways of increasing awareness about protecting this species.

And by the way, the other button leads to more pages like this. So what we can see here is not just a one-off SEO stunt. It’s an entire strategy.

A fair portion of educational keywords is written as questions, making the keywords easier to find. Google even suggests those in almost every search via the PAA box:

1647244724 662 13 Tips for More Traffic

The “People also ask” box for the query “climate change.”

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You can use a keyword tool to get those questions’ SEO metrics and browse them easily:

7. Go after statistical keywords related to your charity (and update regularly)

Statistical keywords imply the use of statistical data to best serve the intent behind the search.

Why should you go after these keywords? Two reasons. First, if there is search demand for them, they can generate organic traffic to your website and make more people aware of your cause. Secondly, they are great “link earners.”

For example, the keyword “human rights issues 2020” is something that is best answered by providing the actual statistics for this problem. And some nonprofits do that:

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Let’s take a closer look at the report ranking #1. This report from Human Rights Watch (one of the many reports in the series) generates over 2.5K monthly visits and about 2K backlinks.

The slope of traffic you can see in the graph above is because the report already became outdated in Q1 of 2021.

This brings us to another point: The important thing to remember about content targeting statistical keywords (including reports) is to keep the content up to date.

Do a small test. Google “human rights issues 2020.” Then “human rights issues 2021.” Now compare the results. I think you will easily spot the same websites with the same kind of content that’s updated according to the year.

8. Invite experts to write for you

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There are certain topics that are best covered by experts. It’s true in life and true in SEO too. We’re talking about the so-called YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics. According to Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines, these topics are:

  • News and current events.
  • Civics, government, and law.
  • Finance.
  • Shopping.
  • Health and safety.
  • Groups of people (information about or claims related to groups of people, including but not limited to those grouped on the basis of race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity).
  • Other topics related to big decisions or important aspects of people’s lives that may be considered YMYL. These include fitness and nutrition, housing information, choosing a college, finding a job, etc.

If you’re creating informational or educational content related to one of these topics, you may want to consider demonstrating E‑A-T to improve your rankings on SERPs.

E‑A‑T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Same as YMYL, this concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines, a document used by human quality raters to assess the quality of Google’s search results.

To put it simply, it’s best if that type of content is up to date, is accurate, quotes trustworthy sources, and is written or at least reviewed by an expert on the topic (and information on that expert is transparent and clearly displayed on the page).

To illustrate, here’s an example from Human Rights Watch. This is a news article about Afghan women’s rights activists:

Excerpt of Human Rights Watch article on women's rights in Afghanistan; picture of women holding protest signs about oppression

When we click on the author’s bio, we can clearly see that the article was written by someone who is highly knowledgeable about the issue:

Picture of expert guest poster, Patricia Gossman, who is an associate director

And here’s an example of how you can demonstrate E‑A-T: having a reviewer assess your content. Notice that there’s also a date showing when the review took place:

Excerpt of article on abdominal pain; text shows article was reviewed by a doctor

Recommended reading: What Is EAT? Why It’s Important for SEO 

9. Translate your content to other languages (for global nonprofits)

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Global charities need global visibility. Organic traffic coming from multiple countries can greatly contribute to that goal. Hence, it’s important to implement some good practices of international SEO.

The first thing to note is that ranking high in one country doesn’t necessarily imply getting the same or even similar results in other countries. This is because Google localizes its search results based on the country and language of the query.

Let’s take a look at the results of translating Oxfam’s article about natural disasters. For the English version, the top five countries in terms of keywords and traffic are countries where search queries in English are native or very common:

And this is the same chart for the article’s Spanish version. We see Spanish-speaking countries dominating the top five.

Traffic share by country; list of countries with corresponding data (traffic, share, keywords)

At the same time, the United States, which ranks #2 for the English version, here ranks #10 with only 76 keywords (and all in Spanish).

Here’s another interesting fact. It will be easier to rank for keywords in some countries than in others. So if you think a keyword will be too hard to target in one language, try another language (provided your organization operates in those countries).

List of keyword ideas for "famine" in U.S.

The word “famine” in the U.S. has a KD score of 60. This also means you’ll need backlinks from ~129 websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

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List of keyword ideas for "famine" in France

The word “famine” in France has a KD score of 3. We estimate that you’ll need backlinks from ~four websites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

Besides translating content, here are some things you can do to improve your international search rankings:

  • Consider a localized URL structure and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Get links from local sources to your localized content
  • Link to local sources from your localized content
  • Keep in mind that Google isn’t the most popular search engine in some countries

You will find more details and tips for international SEO in our guides:

Pro tip

If you want to easily view depersonalized search results for different countries and different languages, try Ahrefs’ free SEO Toolbar.

Both locally operating nonprofits and global nonprofits can use local SEO to improve their rankings on search engines. Here’s how they can benefit from that.

When people look for your organization with a keyword containing a specific location, your organization’s branch can show up in the local map pack. Here’s an example for the query “unicef new york”:

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Google map pack for keyword "unicef new york"

So a person searching for this query can use these results to easily locate UNICEF’s branches in this region. But since UNICEF also has a page with information for people interested in the organization’s work in this part of the U.S., searchers can also click on these results:

Excerpt of Google SERP showing UNICEF branches

Another way local SEO helps to point people in your direction is search results personalized by location, e.g., “non profit organizations near me”:

Google map pack for keyword "non profit organizations near me"

In this map pack, we have results that don’t show up on the first page of blue link search results. This means that by being featured in the map pack, these nonprofit organizations got a chance to jump over the other pages (no matter how well they were optimized for Google).

So if your organization has branches in different cities, here are the basic things you can do to leverage local SEO:

  • Get a Google Business Profile and encourage some reviews of your local branches
  • Create locally optimized landing pages
  • Get links from local resources (and link to local resources too)

If you’d like to learn more on this topic, head over to our guides:

11. Get a Google Knowledge Panel

This is a Google Knowledge Panel:

Google Knowledge Panel for search term "Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity"

You can find panels like this in many searches, not only for organizations or businesses. The knowledge panel is based on information in Google’s Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base of entities and the relationships between them. In this case, the entity is the nonprofit organization, Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity.

Knowledge panels matter for SEO (and for marketing in general) for a couple of reasons:

  • Having a knowledge graph allows you to “own” more SERP real estate. As you can see, it’s really hard to overlook these panels; these panels give your organization’s brand more visibility.
  • Aside from visibility, you can benefit from more credibility. If people want to look your organization up online because they want to volunteer or donate, having Google show this feature is almost like saying, “Yes, this organization is legit.”

Knowledge panels are something that nonprofits and charities should definitely go for. But I must warn you right away. Out of all the tips mentioned here, it’s probably the hardest thing to do. So to increase your chances, see this guide.

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12. Optimize for branded search

Branded search is any kind of query that contains words and phrases associated with your brand, products, or services.

Here is an example of a page that is partly optimized for branded search. If you Google the query “wwf logo” (the famous panda logo of WWF), you will find this page:

Excerpt of "WWF Logo is the Panda" article

Notice anything strange here? Well, there’s no downloadable logo. If there was a logo on this page that visitors could use, they wouldn’t have to go back to the SERP and get the logo from another site. Wasted opportunity.

Why is this page only partly optimized for branded search? Because it ranks #1 for the query “wwf logo.” But it doesn’t fully serve the search intent behind the query, and that is to get a file with WWF’s logo.

The takeaway is quite simple here:

  • Discover the branded keywords people look for to find information about your organization
  • Create content that targets those keywords while serving the search intent

You can find your branded keywords using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (or Google Search Console). Just open the Organic keywords report and filter the results using your organization’s name.

Organic Keywords report results

In extreme cases, you won’t rank for some of your branded keywords. To find such instances, you will need to use a keyword research tool, such as the ones I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

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13. Don’t forget to interlink your content

So let’s say you already have great content that attracts some high-quality links. As you should already know, those links definitely help that content rank higher on SERPs. But did you know those same links can help other pieces of content rank as well?

I’m talking about link equity, i.e., the “authority” that is passed when one page links to another.

You can pass link authority from one page to another if you link them, provided the links are relevant. These kinds of links are called internal links because they point to other pages in the same domain.

For example, here is an article from Oxfam about how the pandemic pushed more people into famine-like conditions. Notice how it links to a relevant report on the issue:

Excerpt of Oxfam article

The best way to add relevant internal links is to do that as you write. You can just search through your existing content for articles that target certain keywords and link them to relevant (important!) articles. Or you can do it more strategically by designing a content hub.

But if you want to find relevant internal link opportunities to your existing content, you can automate the process using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Just sign up, crawl your site with Site Audit, and go to the Link opportunities report. This will show you relevant internal linking opportunities across your site.

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Link opportunities report results

Recommended reading: Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide         

Final thoughts

These 13 tips are by no means an SEO course. Nor are they a complete list of things nonprofits and charities can do for SEO. If you’re an SEO beginner or just want to revise your fundamentals, I highly recommend Ahrefs’ complete guide to SEO. I’m sure that you’ll come up with some more SEO ideas after reading it.

I’d like to conclude with a tip that is partly about SEO. If the competition on the SERPs gets too tough, nonprofits can use Google Ad Grants ($10K/mo) to jump over other search results.

Example of Google ad in SERP

On top of that, Google Ads is a tried and tested way to get backlinks for some types of content.

Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.




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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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Step-by-Step: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for SEO

Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.

However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort. 

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Refresh Content 

If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely. 

This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.

Delete Old Blog Posts 

You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it. 

Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.

Promote Old Blog Posts 

Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit. 

Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.

If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings. 

Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic. 

With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.

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Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.

Conduct New Keyword Research

Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic. 

Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too. 

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it. 

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags. 

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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  1. Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
  2. Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
  3. Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made. 

Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page. 

Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags. 

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.

Tighten or Expand Ideas

Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more. 

Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:

  • Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
  • Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
  • Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
  • Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
  • Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
  • Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.

Improve Visuals and Other Media

No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality. 

Update Internal and External Links

Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.

You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.

Optimize for Conversions

When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years. 

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So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.

Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post. 

Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.

Key Takeaway

Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions. 

By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

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