Saving Old Content With Winnable New Keywords [Unlike What Rose Did to Jack in The Titanic!]

What do you do when you know you’ve written an amazing piece of content but Google won’t give it the love it deserves?

It could very well be that you’ve optimized that amazing but poor piece of content for a very competitive keyword.

And that’s a gnarly death for an amazing piece of content but in this article, I’m going to show you how to save it and make it an article that gets tons of love from Google!

Let’s save your awesome piece of content and modify it to fit a new keyword that your blog can rank with and bring in visitors.

The Art of Finding New and Less Competitive Primary Keywords

If you see content that isn’t ranking for its primary keyword, it’s worth it to research if you are targeting competitive keywords that your blog is too young (and lacking authority) to rank for.  Unless you are ranking on pages 1 or 2, take a look at some of your posts and jot down the monthly search volume for the primary keywords you were targeting at the time of publishing.

If your blog is ranking on pages 3-10+ after 9 months of publishing, it’s time to do justice.

This can be a clear indication that you’ve been targeting keywords that are way higher in search volume and hence high in competition.

Now it’s time to do better keyword research and find variations of the existing keywords that are long-tail (and are much easier to rank for).

Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Example 1:

• litter training a cat – 720 searches/month
• how do you litter train a cat – 90 searches/month

The first keyword is guaranteed to have a lot more competition.   It receives hundreds of searches per month and a lot of big sites in the cat/pet niches as well as blogs are aiming for it.  You can go further down the list and explore a close variation of this keyword; in this case, I found one that receives only 90 searches/month but if your blog can rank in the top for it, that’s way better than never ranking for a keyword that receives hundreds of searches per month.

Example 2:

• fishing for beginners – 1600 searches/month
• learn how to fish for beginners – 70 searches/month
• how to start fishing for beginners – 10 searches/month

The first keyword will get most people foaming at the mouth because hey, who doesn’t want hundreds of people finding their article?  But, if you don’t have a blog that’s reached a certain authority level, it won’t be able to rank for that keyword.  You can aim for one of the other two and get some traffic to your article much, much faster.  However, if your blog is ranking for keywords that receive hundreds and thousands in search volume, then aim for the first keyword.

Example 3:

• making ice cream at home – 4,400 searches/month
• making ice cream at home without a machine – 50 searches/month

Same here.  Having done SEO professionally for so long, the first keyword has me super excited but the reality of getting to the top of Google with that keyword is next to nothing unless I have a super blog that is absolutely thriving with authority (it’s been in existence for years, gets awesome traffic, has hundreds of backlinks already).

Summary

As a smaller blog, I can aim for keywords that are the same in intent and I have a much higher chance in competition.

I want to taste the traffic as fast as possible!

It is also worth mentioning that even if you aim for the long-tail keywords that receive a small number of searches per month, your article ends up ranking for other close variations and bring in additional traffic.

Now that you know you can choose keywords that your blog can actually rank for, you can update your older content, make it as awesome as possible, and optimize it for the new primary keyword.

Have questions? Ask in the AP FB Community where I drop by daily to answer a couple of questions.