Your Travel Blog is definitely your most versatile tool for creating content that is always up-to-date, while also going through the enhancement of past articles.
Blogging will help you:
- Build relevance – so that you position for more search queries.
- Build authority – so that you rank higher in search engines.
To achieve these two goals, a winning blog strategy can become the main magnet for attracting online traffic from your target users. On an organic level, a blog that periodically publishes fresh, quality content will impact your visibility.
Let’s see what is Historical SEO is applied to a successful case study we followed, You Local Rome.
Why is Historical SEO a key element for your Travel Blog?
Making a few changes to blog posts you’ve already written can dramatically improve your rankings. But let’s start with its definition.
What is Historical SEO?
It involves optimizing old blog posts so that they are fresh, up-to-date, and able to rank higher in search results. Simply put, it means doing content curation of existing articles. So they will be able to generate even more traffic and conversions.
Here are 3 reasons why Historical SEO leads to better search rankings:
- Google rewards freshness, and so do users searching online;
- Google leverages the authority the post has already created;
- The wave of new visits will naturally lead to new links and shares on social.
Travel Blog: case study You Local Rome
Based on these assumptions, we adopted Historical SEO with one of our historical clients (pardon the pun 😉), with whom we had already produced several articles related to the “Food” and “Food tips” sections. YouLocal is a tour & activity provider in the city of Rome, a true community of Romans, by birth or adoption that creates experiences related to art, history, cuisine and hidden gems of Rome. Food and wine tours are one of the client’s goodies, offering immersion experiences in the Roman culinary tradition. After Covid we decided together to raise the cluster dedicated to this aspect. We updated the old blog posts with new content and linked them to new content to create an interconnected network of articles covering all topics on “food” search.
Historical SEO Steps
Here are the steps we followed:
Content Audit of existing blog posts were categorized by Tours and Tips.
Identifying blog posts that deserve to be updated and especially those that could serve as a pillar for the food cluster. Our choice went in this direction:
- Posts that are outdated or could be improved;
- Posts that have the potential to rank higher for topics and keywords with high search volume.
Updating content aimed at three goals: accuracy, freshness and completeness. In general, it is important to try to make enough improvements to a post to justify republishing it as new.
Optimizing the article for search engines. We implemented on-page keyword research by updating meta tags.
Publication of the updated post as new by changing the publication date so that it appears as a new blog post. This can be followed by promotion through newsletters, social media and other promotional channels.
Link building between the pillar and various related topics, to create an interconnected system that comprehensively covers the topic.
It is always useful to add an editor’s note to the publication, as here in the example.
“Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in August 2019 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy and comprehensiveness”.
Historical SEO is not everything on your Travel Blog
Historical SEO should be one key element for your Travel Blog, not the only one. So it is important to carry this strategy forward over time and alongside the production of new content.
It is equally important to carry on content curation and creation of new content also in line with new trends and topics emerging in the industry.
It’s your decision to reach the editorial balance between updating old content and creating new content. As a starting point, we recommend checking out old content to determine how many opportunities to update posts you may have.
With You Local Rome, alongside the Historical SEO strategy, we continued with the normal Travel Blog activity with a Project Outline on the food category.
Historical SEO results
As we can see from this screenshot from Analytics, in the month of May there were about 10k more users on keywords profiled within 2 years. In the Audience Overview we see how organic traffic stands out among all users visiting the site.
From this screenshot we can see the organic keywords entered the top 3, 4-10 and 11-20 Google rankings, including of the Food Pillar “Trastevere street food”, “Wine bars Rome”, “Rome Italy street food”.
So in a nutshell: we often focus on increasing organic traffic in our Travel Blog by creating new content, creating new editorial plans, without going to take into account what has been done in the past that could be improved.
This could be a winning strategy for you too!
If you need a hand, we are here to help 😉
