




So we ran an experiment.




google analytics screenshot 1


google analytics screenshot 2


google analytics screenshot 3



Here’s what we’re going to cover:

  1. Identifying content worth optimizing
  2. Prioritizing what content to optimize
  3. Optimizing individual pieces of content
  4. Re-promoting the content
  5. Tracking the results for further optimizations

1. Identifying Content Worth Optimizing



google analytics traffic


traffic four pages




  1. Starting to rank in Google for a relevant target keyword
  2. Not currently in the top 1–5 results
  3. Has a relevant keyword with decent search volume


Once you login and select your site, you need to:

  2. Select “Impressions” and “Position”
  3. Filter by “Pages.”

search console pages


google search console impressions



google search console position



search analytics 1



I’m going to use fairly simple criteria for this:



search analytics 2

Next up, prioritizing the list.

2: Prioritizing Your List of Targets





search analytics 3




ahrefs organic keywords nat eliason

Organic Keywords report in Ahrefs Site Explorer



search analytics 4



So in this sheet, the formula would be:

=(I2 / J2 ^ 2) / 100


search analytics 5




search analytics 6

Now we need to optimize them.

3: Optimizing Your Target Pages


  1. The quality of the content
  2. The user experience of the content
  3. The technical health of the page


3.1 Optimizing the Content Quality

The first question you have to ask is:

Can I improve this content to make it more competitive?



what every body is saying google

Some things stand out as potential content improvement opportunities:

  1. More images



what every body is saying clearscope

Editor’s note

I didn’t want to remove Nat’s Clearscope recommendation (as it’s what he uses), but admittedly it isn’t the cheapest tool out there. ($300/month!)

So here are a few similar useful tools:

  • Ryte.comTF*IDF analysis tool, and other content optimization features.
  • LSIGraph—the “LSI keywords” tool. Honestly, I’m not really a fan of this one, as the keywords it kicks back aren’t true LSI keywords. So take the recommendations with a pinch of salt.
  • Hemingway App—readability metrics, word count, etc. Really nice app, and totally free to use.
Joshua Hardwick
Joshua Hardwick
Head of Content

This tells me a few things:

  1. My post is probably too long, I could cut some material.
  2. I’m missing a lot of relevant information, like some background on Joe Navarro and what the book is about.
  3. I might need to simplify my language a bit (though, I’m just copying from the book right now).

From looking through these two sources, we have a good checklist for the content:

  1. Make it shorter
  2. Add an intro section about the book
  3. Add some of my interpretation and impressions
  4. Add some images

I focused on cutting out about 1,500 words and adding an intro section about the book. I didn’t want to steal images from the book, even though they’d probably help.

3.2 Optimizing the User Experience of the Content

Next up, you need to make sure people stick around and read the article when they show up there. And right now, this article is horribly optimized for user experience.

Before going through these optimizations, this is what the page looked like:

pre editing

That is a painful wall of text, and I couldn’t blame anyone for seeing that and immediately closing the page.

So to make it more UX friendly, I went through and added bolding and headers, to make sure it was more readable and skimmable, and to highlight the important information.

post editing

Some other things I would check for to make sure the UX is good:

  1. Fast page load time
  2. No huge image blocking the initial text section
  3. No funky CSS, styling, inconsistent headers, anything that makes it look sloppy
  4. A catchy intro, something to let people know they’re in the right place

3.3 Optimizing the Technical Health of the Content

The last step is to make sure there’s nothing broken on the page.

There are various tools you can use to do this, but I recommend Ahrefs Site Audit.

Here’s Sam Oh explaining how to use this tool:

You’re looking for common technical issues, such as:

  • Broken images
  • Broken links
  • HTTP or HTTPS mixed content
  • Images without alt text
  • Images that are too big
  • Keyword stuffing or underuse
  • Too short or too long meta descriptions and titles
  • Too large of a page size
  • Bad mobile responsiveness

In the case of this page, a few errors stood out:

  1. There are multiple title tags on the page
  2. The meta description doesn’t have the keyword in it
  3. The keyword only appears once in the body
  4. Four images on the page have empty alt text

Once those are fixed up, this part is done!

The content is ready to be republished, by changing the “published at” date to today in WordPress, and hitting “Update.”

publish on wp

4: Re-Promoting the Content

Whatever playbook you have for new content promotion, you’ll want to selectively run through it again for your newly-updated post.

Some steps won’t make sense to do over again. If you send out an email blast for every new post, you might not want to email about an updated one, unless you’ve changed so much in it that you think it’d be worthwhile to blast it to your list again.

But some of the lighter-weight promotion strategies, like sharing on social media, posting to message boards, sharing in any owned online groups, and sending it to anyone mentioned in the piece (especially newly mentioned people) are definitely worth doing.

Getting a bump of traffic to the newly-updated post should help it start to rank better more quickly.

In this case since it’s not a massive post, I’d probably stick to sharing it on social media and mentioning it further down in my weekly newsletter.

But if I did a big overhaul to a post like the one you’re reading right now, it would warrant another round of more aggressive promotion.

Editor’s note

Re-promoting rewritten and refreshed content is something we regularly do at Ahrefs.

For example, if you’re subscribed to the Ahrefs blog, you may remember getting this email in your inbox a few months back:

seo tips revamp

This was a huge update, so we re-promoted the post.

Joshua Hardwick
Joshua Hardwick
Head of Content

5: Tracking Results for Further Optimizations

The last step is to keep a record of what posts you’ve optimized, and how well they’re ranking, in a spreadsheet or in a rank tracker like the one Ahrefs has.

Add the keyword that you optimized the post around, and then keep an eye on it every week or so to see how it’s trending.

Based on where the stats are right now, I’d consider re-optimizing the first seven articles if it had been at least three months since they were posted, since they’re hanging out on the second to fourth page:

keywords ahrefs

After around three months it should stabilize at its new position, which will give you an idea of whether or not you need to do further work on it, or try to build more backlinks to it.

Final Thoughts

Once you have one post optimized, republished, promoted and tracked, it’s time to move on to the next one.

This is meant to be a process for doubling the traffic to your whole blog, not just one article, so you want to keep moving through the list you created in step two until you’re done with all of the posts that have a high potential for getting more traffic.

Once you’ve finished with the list, you can let them sit while you produce new content, and then keep repeating this process every three to six months to make sure you’re getting the absolute most you can from your blog.

You’ve already created plenty of potentially valuable content. You’ll get much faster results re-optimizing it than trying to constantly pump out new pieces.