Ages ago on the Internet—so like, 5 years ago—my SEO strategy was simple:

Put the most information about a topic on a page about that topic, and make sure it’s good enough for others to link to.

And for all intents and purposes, it worked!

Until it didn’t.

Why did it stop working? Because the way people consumed content, and where people consumed content, began to change.

More and more people started to consume videos and podcasts, and less read blogs. Stories became more interesting in video or audio format, and when I think about my own user behavior when searching on Google, I totally understand.

Today, on Google, my user behavior is like this:

• I search for specific information about something.
• I get the information I need.
• I move on.

Sometimes that information I find isn’t even on another website, it’s shared in a snippet on Google on that search results page.

No wonder it’s harder to get loads of traffic via Google than it once was!

But, it’s not entirely impossible.

There’s still free traffic to be had from Google, so it makes sense to make SEO a part of your strategy. One strategy that’s been working for us lately at SPI is to revisit older blog posts and re-publish them with this new user behavior in mind.

What does that mean exactly?

That means getting rid of the unnecessaries:

• The long, drawn out introduction that sets up the entire article.
• The stories that aren’t important to the user.
• The additional sections about second- and third-tier keywords that aren’t absolutely crucial to what users came to that page to learn.

In other words, I deleted a lot of the content on my blog posts. As a result, we saw an instant rise in most of those posts’ rankings and more traffic coming to the site.

It seems counter-intuitive... until I think about how many of us search for recipes when cooking at home.

The most useful recipes are the ones that get me cooking faster. Tell me the ingredients, tell me what to do with them, and help me feed my family. The 5000 words about how the recipe was handed down from someone’s great-great-great-grandma, although interesting, isn’t what drew me there from Google.

Taking this approach, here’s what one updated post did within 7 days:

And here’s another:

I was talking to a friend about this the other day and we both came to the same conclusion:

It seems disheartening on the surface, but when you really think about it, this makes sense.

People come to Google to get an answer. If you give them the best answer and make that a quick win for people, there’s a chance they’ll look at what else you have to offer. They may end up joining your newsletter or email list, and then you can go deeper with them and establish a relationship. It’s also then that they feel more comfortable conversing with you and opening up about where exactly they’re at, and potentially how the solutions you offer could help.

YOUR CALL TO ACTION

If you already have blog posts, look for articles that seem to rank on the second page of Google, or near the bottom of the first page. You can use a tool like UberSuggest from Neil Patel to set up rank tracking for your website and determine which keywords you may already be ranking for and which ones you should optimize for.

From there, re-read what you’ve written and optimize it for users who just found your blog post on Google. Again, by deleting most of the introductions and in-depth stories I had (I still kept some stories to demonstrate expertise and authority), I was able to rank several keywords much higher within a short time period.

If you don’t have blog posts, keep the same principles in mind while writing new articles. See what articles out there already rank high for specific keywords, and try to write one that’s simply better. And remember, better doesn’t always mean longer—what’s the goal and intent of the user?

Optimize for that.