How to Improve Google Rank for Old Posts - I'm on a Mission

How to Improve Google Rank

I have loads of new blog posts I want to write for my Earn Money with Marcus website, but that's now temporarily on hold. Yesterday, while taking a quick look at my SERP Lab ranking stats, I realised there were some keywords which SERP Lab said were getting lots of monthly searches, but which I was not ranking well for.

I remembered what Dom said in his recent niche site case study about being able to improve the rankings of old posts, which can lead to an overall dramatic increase in traffic.

So I spent several hours yesterday seeing if I could improve the on-page SEO for those old posts by adding the following if they were not already there:

• Keyword in title.
• Keyword in first sentence.
• Keyword near the end of post.
• Keyword in alt tag of image.
• Video with same keyword near the top of post.

By doing those 5 things, I was able to improve the ranking of most of the posts I edited yesterday. Although I think only one of them actually made it to page 1 of Google, most of the others did jump significantly higher in the Google results.

So then I added all my previous keywords into SERP Lab.

But just to back track a minute:

Back in December 2015, I created my 2nd site, Synths and Software. While I was focusing on that for several months, I wasn't doing much with EMWM, so at some point I deleted all the EMWM keywords from SERP Lab.

But then when I put S&S to one side and went back to working on EMWM again, I started putting any new keywords into SERP Lab. But yesterday I realised there were loads of previous keywords no longer in there, so I copied all the tags from my EMWM posts and put them in. Now, after I deleted some that I don't need, I'm still left with 492 keywords.

(By the way, I don't have 492 posts. I have multiple tags per post.)

The problem is, a free SERP Lab account can only check 150 keywords per day, and I already have it set to check weekly, it's going to take a while before I see what's going on with all keywords.

But in the meantime, I have plenty that are already showing as getting lots of searches. I can work on those and try to improve their rankings.

I the 5 things I mentioned above don't work well enough, I can probably improve them further by doing the following:

• Adding more content to the posts (e.g. adding 500 more words).
• Using the SiteComments tool to get comments.
• Creating internal links from other content on the site.
• Getting some social media activity going on, perhaps by using a tool like Mass Planner.

Have you managed to improve Google rank for your old posts? If so, how did you do it?