Every law firm wants a vibrant and dynamic website that gets lots of traffic and converts visitors into leads. One strategy for doing this is to refresh older content in addition to creating new content each month. Why rely solely on writing new blogs and pages when you can update what were once well-performing articles that have lost their luster and faded over time?
Known as “historical optimization,” this underutilized strategy allows you to get more mileage out of work you’ve already published. Historical optimization breathes new life into older content on your site that has a high likelihood of getting more visitors and ranking higher in Google search results if rewritten, expanded, and refreshed.
Historical optimization turns older content into vibrant, new, well-performing pages that rank well and have increased longevity.
When we talk about historical optimization for law firms, we want to focus on older content – published more than 12 months ago – that is still informative and relevant but may be poorly optimized for keywords, contains outdated statistics or broken links, or is too short to be comprehensive. For example, a blog that explains voice search for lawyers written in 2016 will not have the most up-to-date metrics or applications, given the explosion in voice search in recent years. The year 2016 was a lifetime ago when it comes to a piece about AI-inspired voice search! By updating the voice search content with new statistics, explanations, optimization, and a current date, it could generate a higher volume of organic traffic to your website and improve UX.
You also want to focus on older content that achieved featured snippet status on a Google SERP page. These blogs and webpages obviously did something right and are useful to readers because Google’s algorithm selected them for featured snippets. By historically optimizing this content, you can ensure its chances of remaining on top, so it continues to hold this coveted featured snippet position.
Focus your historical optimization efforts on content that supports the practice areas and legal services you want to promote right now.
Historical Optimization for Lawyers: Getting Started
Below are five steps you can take as part of your historical content optimization plan. By being methodical and organized in your efforts, you can use your content again and again to stimulate and engage readers. Be sure to focus first on the most high-potential content.
1. Identify the Right Content
According to research by HubSpot, you can focus on four core areas when identifying older content on your website that might be good candidates for historical optimization. These include:
High bounce rate posts – These are your articles that may have a lot of traffic, but readers don’t stay on the page very long before leaving.
Low conversion posts – These are your articles that get a lot of traffic but generate few phone calls or chats to your office.
High-indexed, low-clicked posts from SERP – This is an article that ranks well on Google’s page-one SERP, but few users click on it.
Page one ranking opportunities – These are your articles that show up on page two or three of Google search results but might have a chance of getting on page one with a little optimization and fresh content.
2. Rewrite and Re-Optimize Blogs and Webpages
Amazon’s Alexa recommends these tips for optimizing older content:
Review on-page photos, graphics, call outs, and writing to find areas for improvement.
Analyze the keyword(s) you intend the page to rank for.
Add elements that keep the reader interested and delighted.
Update the publish date, promote the content on social media, and submit the URL to Google Search Console so it is crawled immediately.
3. Combine Pieces and Expand Links
Do a content audit of your website and see what’s out there on a variety of topics. Often you will find that you have 3-4 blogs and/or pages on a similar topic that have been written over the years, none of which is performing particularly well. Rather than split traffic between pieces and compromise SEO performance, you can combine all of these into one longer, more comprehensive piece with in-depth analysis, fresh examples, better keyword optimization, and new internal and external links. You can redirect URLs from the former pages to the new, longer piece. With little effort (you don’t have to start from scratch), you can boost visibility and increase the likelihood of conversions.
4. Measure Performance
You want to measure pre- and post-optimization analytics for each page so you can determine the effectiveness of your historical optimization efforts. You can check a page’s traffic level and SERP ranking before making changes, and then check it again about 30 days after optimizing. Check it again 60 days later. This should give you a good measurement of how effective your historical content optimization activities are.
5. Continually Refresh
Make historical optimization a complimentary tactic in your overall law firm marketing strategy, along with writing new content each month. This two-pronged approach ensures that you’re squeezing the best performance out of older articles. By keeping content evergreen, you extend the life of pieces you painstakingly created in the past. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel if simply adding air to the tire will get the job done!
How To Make Your Content Stand Out
There’s no substitute for outstanding writing. Writing is not an area in which to skimp when hiring staff or outside freelancers. Also, make sure you’ve done sophisticated keyword research so your SEO performance is ensured. Internal linking and authentic backlinking is also key, as is choosing the correct title tag and metadata. Using pertinent examples, a Q&A format, scannable sub-headings, callouts, and effective CTAs can also make your content stand out.
Gladiator Can Help Historically Optimize Your Content
If historically optimizing the content on your website feels like a daunting task, perhaps you need to call in the experts for some much-needed help. Gladiator Law Marketing has years of experience and skill in creating and updating content and formulating an overall SEO strategy to increase a client’s website performance. We’d welcome a conversation to discuss your ideas and needs. Call us for a free consultation at 888-683-3212.
