Give Old Content a Refresh with Melissa Riker

Are you busy updating old content on your site? Today’s guest, Melissa Riker, shares tips for the best ways to Give Old Content a Refresh so that it’s user friendly and SEO optimized! Learn tips to manage your time and hire help to get your content updated. And while you’re at it, get inspired by the conversation around staying motivated, food photography and styling, and so much more!

About Melissa Riker

Melissa started her very first blog when she was traveling a lot because of being in a military family. Her blog gave her a chance to reconnect with family and friends across the globe.

She started sharing crafts and recipes and the site gave her a glimpse of what blogging could be like. She decided after that to start The Happier Homemaker where she blogs about crafts, cleaning tips, recipes, and being a mom.

Over the years she began sharing more and more recipes. She had a passion for food since she shared recipes with her grandmother.

Melissa quit grad school when she got married and had a baby. Her degree was in cancer pathology so she was paying off student debt for a degree she couldn’t use. However, her passion for food blogging was strong and she realized there was no going back!

How to Give Old Content a Refresh

Melissa had a site audit and as a result, she has worked hard to update old content. She had over 1200 blog posts on her site. So, that meant a lot of work had to be done to update and cull old content.

So, for her, that meant hiring someone to help her take photos of old recipes.

Updating old content is a long game. In the middle of her updating old content, her site was hit with a Google update issue. She lost some rankings, but because she knew what needed to be done, she knew exactly how to get into those posts and fix them.

Tip #One: Don’t Neglect Pinterest. Melissa got so busy updating old content that she began to neglect her Pinterest strategy.

Here are some tips from Melissa for updating old content:

• Make sure you don’t have duplicative content (If you have an old post that’s too similar to a new one, you’ll need to determine which one is doing best and consider doing a redirect)
• Keep a spreadsheet to track the progress of the updates you’re doing. Break it down by year published if that’s helpful and then add columns that helps you track everything that needs to be done on each post.
• Some examples of things to change are: index or noindex, fix alt tags, keywords optimized, are pictures good, are in process pics in place, three links in, three links out, scheduled pins, and more. Marly and Melissa add formulas so they can calculate the percent done.
• Marly suggests if you have an old post that needs new photos, but you can combine a couple of photos into a collage on Canva to get it out on Pinterest right away.
• Think about your old content like a door to your store — you want the look and feel to be branded and consistent
• Sometimes even recipes need to be updated — maybe in the beginning you might have used more ingredients, or you used ingredients that are not available anymore.
• Marly adds the tag, “Noindex” when she’s no indexed a post to help her know that a post has been no-indexed.

It’s not write a blog post, publish it, and move on. You are going to have to constantly need to go back and audit what you have and make sure it’s the very best you can give your readers.

Melissa Riker of the Happier Homemaker

Show Notes

Here are the resources mentioned on today’s episode featuring Melissa Riker talking about ways to Give Old Content a Refresh.

• Connect with Melissa on her site The Happier Homemaker or on her new site Shaken Together Life
• Say thanks to our guest today with a shout-out on: Instagram
• Melissa talks about the Food Photography by Recipe Tin Eats
• Melissa used the plugin, Export All URLS to download all her posts and plug them into a spreadsheet
• Melissa talks about her favorite SEO resources, including Casey Markee, Ty Kilgore and Hashtag Jeff.
• Related Post: You’ll love these Pinterest Tips with Kate Ahl
• Connect with Chopped Academy Online:  Instagram  | Twitter
• Related Post: Listen to Marly discuss Tips on Getting Things Done!
• Connect with Marly: Namely Marly |  Instagram  | Twitter
• Today’s post production, music, graphic art & sound design by Shawn Beelman
• Subscribe below to be the first to hear about future Chopped Podcast episodes and get some awesome tips on food blogging. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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