Reviving an old website

[gunnar]

I have a website in the mobile phone niche, that has been neglected for over 5 years.
It still has a few hundred visitors per day and some rankings, but the content is mostly outdated as you can imagine.
It has about 250 article, but a lot of them are very short and/or thin. Domain authority is 25 and around 900 linking domains.
How should i proceed?
Which steps would you recommend to increase the number of visitors and overall popularity?

 

[Ryuzaki]

How should i proceed?

Post new content that isn't super short or thin. There's nothing wrong with "news" content, even if it ages out and stops driving traffic. But it shouldn't be thin or trash because the solution then becomes returning to it to fix it or deleting or 301 redirecting it.

The move, in my opinion, would be to drive traffic with the news posts which you use to build topical relevancy and interlink back to your evergreen content. Between "News" and "How To" content, you have an endless tap of content ideas, but that's all top of the funnel. You can retire off of top of the funnel, don't get me wrong, but you can leverage that to improve the SERP positioning of your middle and bottom of the funnel content, too.

Am I right to assume a lot of those 250 articles were news based? If not, you have a different set of problems that are probably Panda related, page speed related, among other things.

 

[gunnar]

Hi Ryuzaki,

thanks for your help.
The articles are mainly like "how to use * on android 5" or like that. Only 10 % of the posts are news related.
I just started to audit which pages get traffic and have backlinks and so on.
Do you think building silos around main keywords like "phone settings" or "phone browser" and updating the old articles to the new OS versions under their respective silo would work?
Now it is more a blog structure with only a few categories.
Panda hit us hard a few years ago, all the commerce keywords were gone, thats why we neglected it.
Page speed is ok.

 

[bernard]

The first thing I would do is consider what it would look like if you were to create the site today.

What would your site look like if you applied best practise in SEO and content quality and structure?

Then I would compare that to the site as it is now.

Can you redo the site to fit current best practise without it being more expensive than building a new site?

In any case, if you site was hit by Panda, then you need to do that anyway.

As for the content already present, I would look into Google Search Console and see what is driving clicks and impressions for the top 20 pages or so. Pay specific attention to the queries that have impressions but no clicks and queries with low clicks but lots of impressions. These are the queries that Google thinks your page could rank for, if improved.

Then create a new content template for each of these pages so they match the queries. Update or change your pages accordingly. Add new content, replace content, change content, depending on your judgement.

 

[gunnar]

Hi Bernard, thanks for the hints, i think it is time to find some quality writers now.

 

[Bladhark]

Hey Gunnar,

If your content is outdated (and you can't or don't want to update it anymore) you shouldn't bother too much with it but just use them to funnel the traffic/juice/relevance to the new articles you are planning to create.

Recently I started looking more into Semantic SEO, it might be something for you as well. This basically means that you cover everything on a given topic. It's less keyword based but more topic based.

You can have a look at this SEMRush article for more info on that. It is quite some work, but I think for a site like yours which is more info based it might work wonders.

I forgot to link two more interesting case study links about Semantic SEO. They are the same case study but one version is more simplified than the other. Make sure to check those out as well:

https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/importance-topical-authority-semantic-seo/
https://www.holisticseo.digital/theoretical-seo/topical-authority/

I'm not affiliated with any of them either, they are just some amazing pieces of content and information to check out.

 

[GNews]

I agree. Easy solution.

Create news content and try to be FAST in publishing headlines. Also try to find important but obscure headlines, no one's talking about.

Push it viral on reddit!

 

[Randall F]

I have a website in the mobile phone niche, that has been neglected for over 5 years.
It still has a few hundred visitors per day and some rankings, but the content is mostly outdated as you can imagine.
It has about 250 article, but a lot of them are very short and/or thin. Domain authority is 25 and around 900 linking domains.
How should i proceed?
Which steps would you recommend to increase the number of visitors and overall popularity?

Hey gunnar!

Even if you neglected it for some time your site will have undeniable advantage in comparison of any recently made website. Besides the thin/old content is great that the traffic is still flowing from SERPs, because implies some level of trust and now you're ready to exploit it.

Be confident and update it with authority content. Invest money and/or energy injecting social signals to boost the freshness of your website as soon as possible.

Also implement @EyesExist advice, it does work.

Best regards