I Updated The Article That Made Me 4 Figures — Here’s What Happened

An underrated strategy to grow your affiliate income.

Image credit: Canva. The article contains affiliate links. I might get a small commission if you purchase recommended products.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might know I have a website where I run SEO and marketing experiments.

As an SEO specialist, I publish optimized content and experiment with content format and structure to find optimization strategies that work.

Otherwise, how can I call myself an SEO expert?

To tell you more, how can anyone call themselves an SEO expert without knowing the latest industry trends?

It is time-consuming and expensive to conduct experiments on my clients’ websites. Furthermore, they won’t be happy if something does not work. That’s why I use my website to test my ideas.

My website has been growing well, even though it has always been a side hustle. I could only work a few hours a week on my website for the past two years.

Nevertheless, the organic traffic has grown to 6,000 monthly visitors in two years with just 60 pages.

Here is proof from my Google Analytics account:

My website performance in organic search results. Over 68.20% of traffic comes from organic search results.

I achieved it by publishing long, optimized, and helpful content on my website.

Nevertheless, some of the website content has become obsolete. Such web pages lost their rankings, got less traffic, and brought less value.

It is a natural process that happens over time if you don’t update your content. Fresh content from established websites often takes over and pushes other websites down in organic search results.

It’s annoying to see your content losing rankings.

However, this is how Google serves people with fresh and helpful content. Besides, it’s a good motivation for website owners to update to keep their content up-to-date.

I regularly analyze my website performance to discover poorly performing web pages with business potential. By a poorly performing web page, I mean the following:

The number of impressions (views) drops in Google Search Console.
The number of clicks drops in Google Search Console.
Rankings drop in Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
Organic traffic drops in Google Analytics.

My Beehiiv review page was such a web page.

I wrote an in-depth article about Beehiiv, new email marketing software, in April 2021, and it quickly reached the top 5 positions on Google.

Since March 2023, I have earned $2,000+ from the Beehiiv partner program.

Here is a proof:

However, the competition for the target keyword “Beehiiv” has substantially increased over the past year. Why? Because’ Beehiiv’s popularity skyrocketed and more website owners published content around this topic.

Consequently, my Beehiiv review webpage’s performance worsened. In particular:

Impressions dropped.
Clicks dropped from 20–30 per day to 2–5.
The ranking dropped from the top 5 positions to the third Google search result page.
I did not get new referrals in May and June 2023.

The screenshot from my Google Search Console below shows how the performance changed.

My Beehiiv review lost its top position on Google. Consequently, its performance got worsened.

It was time to act.

As an SEO specialist, I knew how to improve my web page’s performance in organic search results.

I’ll share my proven-to-work strategies that you can replicate anytime to improve your website’s performance. I’ve tested this strategy many times on my website and my clients’ websites. That’s why I know it works.

Here is what I did to improve Beehiiv's review performance.

1. Compared my article to the top-performing competitors

My article was among the top 5 search results for a year, but then it dropped suddenly. I wondered what competitors did and what keywords they ranked for to outperform my article.

That’s why I did a quick content gap analysis in Ahrefs to collect keywords the competitor web pages ranked for, but my article did not.

If you don’t use Ahrefs, Semrush has a similar feature called “Keyword Gap.”

2. Rewrote meta title and description

I always analyze the meta titles of the top-performing web pages to craft a more appealing meta title for my web page.

Here is why.

Whenever people google anything, they quickly assess the top 10 results and decide where to click. More appealing or even clickbait meta titles help attract more users from organic search results and increase CTR.

That’s why I dedicate more time to come up with catchy meta titles. Luckily, I can speed up my work by using ChatGPT prompts.

You'll benefit from the following article if you wonder how to use ChatGPT while creating and optimizing content effectively. 👇

5 ChatGPT Prompts I Use to Write High-Ranking Posts for My Website

They work for Google Chatbot — Bard too.

medium.com

Here is my up-to-date Beehiiv’s meta title and description.

My article’s meta title and description preview.

I updated the meta title and description on June 20th, 2023. Here is the CTR (click-though-rate) since then:

Right after the content update, the article jumped back to the top 5 positions on Google (more about it later), so I collected the CTR stats for 21–29th June 2023.

The “Beehiiv review” keyword has the best CTR since the audience does not know the platform yet and is looking for additional information.

Those who google “Beehiiv” will most likely navigate to the Beehiiv main page. That’s why the CTR is lower.

However, there is still room for improvement.

3. Updated over 70% of content

As a content creator, I know about the pros and cons of Beehiiv and its promising monetization opportunities for content creators. That’s why I spent a few hours rewriting the article almost entirely and optimizing it for search engines.

Eventually, I’ve rewritten over 70% of the original content, creating an up-to-date Beehiiv review.

I updated over 70% of my Beehiiv review.

How the article’s performance changed

I spent one day analyzing, rewriting, and optimizing the article. The updated version was released on the 20th of June, 2023.

Here is how the article’s performance changed overnight:

Impressions tripled.
The number of clicks changed from 2–5 to roughly 20–30 per day.
The article returned to the top 5 search engine results for the “beehiiv” keyword and more.
The article started ranking for new keywords, like “beehiiv newsletter” and “beehiiv pricing.”
I’ve got two new referrals within two weeks after the content update.

How my article’s performance changed in organic search results right after publication.

I want to show you one more screenshot from Ahrefs that indicates what happened to my article one day after the content update. The results are mindblowing. Don’t you think so?

After the content update, my article improved its ranking position for the target keyword and started ranking for more keywords.

In conclusion

Content update works!

It’s one of the most underrated SEO strategies proven to work. Yet, giving the content a second life requires research, analysis, and writing skills.

It’s worth mentioning I did not do any link-building after the new version of the article was released. The performance improvement was achieved solely by content updates.

As an SEO writing specialist, I recommend updating your most important website pages at least once a year. This way, you increase the chances of ranking your most essential website pages on the first Google search result page.

📖 Grab my guide to learn how I create blog posts that hit the Google front page.

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