How to Find Your Best Posts to Republish for SEO

If you're republishing old blog posts for SEO, you might be wasting your time.

You see, you don't want to just go through your oldest posts and republish all of them. You want to focus on the ones that have actually lost traffic. Here's how you can find them.

The first thing you want to do is go to the Pages report and then add a new filter so that we're only looking at blog posts. You can do this by adding a page type filter and selecting the post type. You could choose this for a different custom post type if you want, but for this example, we're just looking at blog posts.

And then the next thing you want to do is limit this to only posts that have been published significantly in the past. So you can add another filter for the published date and then say, let's only look at posts published before, and I'll just go back a few, maybe six months, that'll do, and I'll apply that.

So now we're getting a report for only blog posts published at least six months ago. Now, down here, I'll click on Toggle Columns, and I'll show the published date so you can see that these are all published, mostly three or even four years ago from today. So now we have these older posts, but which ones have lost the most traffic? We can find that by enabling the Visitors Growth column.

Now, with visitor growth enabled, we can see how much these pages have grown or shrunk in terms of the number of visitors over the past 30 days. So if you sort by Visitors Growth now, what you're gonna see is that a lot of these pages have actually grown, so maybe my site is doing well, maybe ranking higher, I can see that there's no need to republish these articles even though they're years old because they're growing in traffic. What's the purpose of republishing them if they haven't lost traffic? They're actually gaining traffic, so what I want to do is reverse sort by Visitors Growth, and this is going to give me the pages that have lost traffic.

These are the ones that are actually worth republishing. Now, this website doesn't get a lot of visitors, but you can see right away that there are a couple of posts that only have two visitors. If it's down 50% and, that means I got three visitors in the previous 30 days. Well, I don't want to republish a post just to get one more visitor per month, so what I'll do is I'll add a filter, another condition, and I'll exclude those with visitors, we'll say less than 10.

So your website might be a lot more popular than this one, but for this example, we'll just say fewer than 10 visitors, and we don't care. So now we have a list of seven different posts that have all lost traffic in the last 30 days.

These are the posts that you should spend your time republishing. They've lost traffic. That means they have the most left to gain when you republish them. I'm looking at the last 30 days, but you could expand this to the last three months or the last 6 months, and this is gonna give you a list of posts that are gonna give you the best ROI when you republish them.