It may be 2020, but I have one or two more posts about 2019 coming out this month, counting this one. It’s the last blog traffic report of 2019 and the decade, which is exciting. As you can tell from the title, the big thing I worked on in December was how to make old blog posts more interesting and more relevant for 2019. I started blogging in 2013, so I have a lot of blog posts that have a good “heart” to them but that are relatively short, or aren’t optimized for SEO, or just have out-of-date information or language in them. But I’ll get into what I did to update these posts after I share the results, aka the traffic report. Keep reading to find out!
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How To Make Old Blog Posts More Interesting: The Blog Traffic Report
Google Analytics Statistics
Pageviews: 11,020 (+0.82% from November, +24.09% from last year)
Bounce Rate: 20.16% (-3.1% from November, +49.55% from last year)
Sessions: 4,991 (+6.75% from November, +25.3% from last year)
Users: 4,221 (+4.81% from November, +21.74% from last year)
Bloglovin: 1,823 (+0.94% from November)
Email subscribers: 705 (+0.71% from November, +17.89% from last year)
How I keep my bounce rate so low
Pageviews: 96,884 (+18.9% from November)
Sessions: 38,776 (+15.13% from November)
Users: 2,054 (+19.97% from November)
Social Media
Facebook: 1082 (-0.6% from November, +3.73% from last year)
Twitter: 3666 (-0.6% from November, +10.32% from last year)
Instagram: 2895 (+0.34% from November, +11.81% from last year)
Pinterest: 9145 (+0.66% from November, +25.46% from last year)
Tumblr: 3978 (+0.17% from November, +1.76% from last year)
How I manage social media for my blog | How to get followers on Pinterest
Top Posts
- 10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Received My Rheumatoid Arthritis Diagnosis
- What Does Endometriosis Feel Like?
- POTS and Heat Intolerance
- Accepting Your Body with Chronic Illness
- The Lifestyle Changes I Made for my Rheumatoid Arthritis
- The Products I Loved (And Wanted) in Grad School
- Loving Someone with Chronic Pain
- My Biggest Fear Realized
- Gift Guide: Cyber Monday 2019 Deals
- Chronic Illness and the Holidays: 10 Rules for a Great Season
Top Sources of Traffic
- Pinterest (68.9%) – Pinterest is always my biggest source of blog traffic. If you’re not utilizing Pinterest (or at least optimizing your blog posts for Pinterest), you’re majorly missing out. As a reminder, my blog posts started taking off on Pinterest after I started really taking SEO seriously … because Pinterest is a search engine.
- Search engines (6.46%) – Use SEO! You’re missing out! Yes, this is less than 7% of my traffic, but when you include Pinterest, it’s closer to 75%.
- Facebook (4.36%) – I’m in a lot of Facebook groups for bloggers (not to mention my Facebook page), so I’m glad that that pays off.
- Twitter (1.71%) – I promote my blog posts on Twitter a lot, but tweets have such a short half-life that you have to tweet a LOT for your posts to get traction. So if you’re only promoting your posts a handful of times a day, make sure you do more than that!
This does not count direct traffic.
How to use Pinterest for blog traffic | How to use SEO to stand out
How To Make Old Blog Posts More Interesting: How I Did It
What I Did
- How I promote my blog posts
- Big thing: revamping old blog posts!
- Improving the content overall
- Adding more content; I tried to add at least 1,000 words per post
- Adding more images
- Removing out-dated information
- Adding more keywords; I searched the keyword for the post and scrolled down the bottom of the Google page to see related keywords and added relevant ones.
- Creating new pins for the post
- Adding the pins from these updated posts to Tailwind, either regular queue or Tribes (whether or not the post had a new pin created)
- Added pins of older posts (not new pins, same pins) to my Tailwind queue
- Tried different things with Instagram to boost engagement
- Posting carousels (multiple pictures in 1 post)
- Engagement 30 minutes before and after a post went up
- Using the new story features (mostly on-this-day feature)
Why I switched to MailerLite from MailChimp for my email newsletter
I Haven’t Seen Results From
- Trying different things to boost engagement – While my overall engagement didn’t necessarily improve, my followers did. (But since my engagement percentage didn’t change while my followers did, does that mean that my engagement did improve? Hm …) I am going to continue doing these things for a little while to see if I just need to stick with it for a while.
What I can Learn This Month
- Make your old posts work for you! Even if you have only been blogging for a year, it’s worth going back to older posts to see if they can be updated. Have you learned more information about the topic since you published the post? Have you figured out SEO? Did you join Tailwind? Basically, there are a variety of ways to update old posts, which can depend on your blog and how long you’ve been blogging.
December Goals
- 4 blog posts – Success!
- Increase page views – Success!
January Goals
- 5 blog posts
- 12,000 page views
Have you revamped old blog posts?
Like this post? Check out:
Why Isn’t My Blog Getting Traffic?, The Best WordPress Plugins: The Plugins I Use and Love, 8 Ways To Blog Better, My Proven Method for Blogging with Limited Time
Kate Mitchell is a blogger, chronic illness patient, and advocate who helps people understand chronic illness and helps chronic illness patients live their best lives.
SEO is a whirlwind of craziness for me. I know there’s way more I can be doing — well, basically, I don’t do much at all. But every time I try and figure things out, I end up getting lost in things that just frustrate me. My blog, though it dates back to 2005, has always basically been a mishmash personal blog with random topics and themes. It would be great to have more pageviews and interaction but I’ve just never figured the right touches of SEO. Good luck in your January goals!
It can be a tricky thing to figure out! Keep in mind that you don’t have to include SEO in every single blog post. When I started using it, I started small!