How Updating Content on CXL Increased Traffic to Old Blog Posts by 130% with Derek Gleason – Content Lead at CXL Institute (GMT076)

Just like you regularly clean your kitchen to keep cobwebs and cockroaches away, you should regularly update old content. If you do, the results can be extraordinary. For example, Derek Gleason, Content Lead at CXL, updated old blog posts for CXL that resulted in 130 percent increase in traffic to those posts.

In episode 76, you’ll learn:

  1. The difference between good content and bad content
  2. How CXL updated old blog posts that resulted in 130% traffic increase to those articles
  3. How to rank higher in search engines and how to maintain it
Tweet Some Quotes from This Episode
It’s a challenge to be able to simplify concepts without being reductionist. – @derek_gleason from @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full podcast episode 👇 Click To Tweet I think one of the challenges that I see from some people in content marketing is they start on the marketing side, and they’ve never really been in a serious content side, and I think it’s probably harder to get a feel for what very… Click To Tweet You want to do right by the users, you want to provide the most comprehensive updates as possible, but you’re also on a budget doing this. – @derek_gleason from the @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full episode 👇 Click To Tweet
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My Takeaways from This Episode

  1. Focus on the process instead of the tricks. Derek emphasizes the importance of having your focus on the right part of the process – whether you are focusing on the content itself or blindly trying to use tricks and techniques that would allow you to market your content.
  2. Write content that’s “need to know, hard to find.” I love this distillation of the two qualities of great content. “Need to know” differentiates itself from “nice to know.” It’s something people need to do their job well. “Hard to find” speaks to the quality and depth of the article, and not just another “listicle.”
  3. Avoid the big “M” mistakes with your content. Derek likes to use the term derivative content for the really terrible stuff that makes it out there a lot, which is, somebody goes in and they Google a topic, they look at the first five or seven search results, and they create a post. It’s a mashup of those things. It’s also articles that are too outdated such as a Google Tag Manager article that still uses images of the old interface.
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About Derek Gleason

Derek Gleason is the Content Lead at CXL. He used to do agency-side content marketing and SEO. Before that, he edited encyclopedias.

Key Discussion Points
  • 9:31 – Derek’s journey from editing encyclopedias to digital content marketing
  • 17:06 – How to maintain SEO rankings for blog posts
  • 25:13 – The big mistakes marketing teams make with content
  • 33:42 – How to continuously update content to increase SEO ranking
  • 39:14 – The difference in good content and bad content
  • 51:58 – Derek’s advice for the other content marketers
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