One of the perks of marketing with Pinterest is that Pinterest marketing has a snowball effect, in a couple of ways. A blog post that you pinned a year ago (sometimes even longer) can continue to bring traffic to your website in perpetuity, and every pin has this potential.

This means Pinterest users are coming to your site by way of a lot of different pins.

For this reason, you’ll want to make sure your posts are optimized so that a reader will want to stick around on your website or blog once they find you.

This doesn’t mean that you need to constantly be churning out new content. New content is awesome, but it’s even more important that your existing content remains fresh and updated.

Pinterest High and Low Seasons

Right now, we’re entering what we call the “high season” in Pinterest marketing.

Content that you created for Halloween or Thanksgiving in years past is very likely going to be popping up in the search bar again soon. Now’s the time to go back and revisit those posts to make sure that the content appears current and relevant to readers when they enter your site through that door. You don’t want it to be obvious that you created that content 5 years ago!

From our experience working with Pinterest clients for almost 7 years, one of the things we’ve noticed is that when people, (especially in North America) are spending more time outside (like in the summertime), Pinterest traffic declines. This happens from around April until the beginning of August.

For some people, this could be a time of increased traffic, depending on your niche. August to February is typically an increased traffic season for most marketers.

The reason it’s vital to constantly be looking at your old content is because there’s probably a lot of seasonal posts that you can optimize for the next time that that specific content will be trending on Pinterest.

To identify your high and low seasons, look at your Google analytics for an entire year or two years if possible. You will start to see peaks and valleys that identify the high and low season for your particular site.

Knowing this will prevent you from going crazy when you see your traffic begin to drop. Want to see an example of how to update a post? Here’s one of our older posts that we recently updated.

5 Step Plan for Optimizing Old Blog Content

Here are 5 things that we try to do with every post that we update:

1. Read through the content inside the post.

We add words or new information that people might be looking for. We also take away any content that isn’t relevant…anymore. Pinterest changes so often that we have to make sure that all the information we’re sharing is still correct.

2. Link to other content on your site.

This is called internal linking. Chances are that we’ve written a post about something similar to this older content that we can link to in the older post. So we go through and link to any other newer content on our site that is relevant.

3. Look at the images and update them with new images.

But don’t take down an old image if it’s coming up in a Google image search! Often we will replace the older images with newer ones, or hide old images and only display the newer image. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but make sure that the new and old images look similar so that your reader isn’t confused.

4. Add affiliate links or links to products you sell.

We have a few affiliates that we work with, and we strategically choose where we use those links.

If it is a post that talks about increasing followers, we would link to MiloTree. If it’s a post about blogging, I would insert a link to Elite Blog Academy. And if it’s a post about Pinterest marketing, I might link to Pinterest Everything, which is our membership site. Make sure there is a way for you to make money inside of the post if it makes sense.

5. Have a call to action. This could include signing up for an email list, joining a Facebook group, following you on Instagram or any other social media. This encourages your audience to further engage with you in some way.

How Much Time Will It Take to Optimize Old Blog Content?

So now that you know how to optimize old blog content, you may be wondering if this activity is going to be a huge time suck. I just batch-updated a group of posts in July while we were taking a break from podcast creation. It took me an average of about 30 minutes to update each of the posts.

I do have a creative team that creates images for me, which is hugely helpful. If you are doing that piece yourself, that might take an extra 30-45 minutes. I would aim to update two to three old posts per week.

You can add them into the week, or if you are like me, you can get on a roll and update five at one time in a couple of hours.

Tell Your Audience About Your Updated Blog Content

Let your audience know that you have updated your posts. You can do this through your email or on social media. It’s vital that they know that your content is fresh and relevant. You don’t want your audience to miss it.

Audience engagement plays an important role on Pinterest. The more shares from your site, the more eyes that are going to be seeing your content. Ask your audience to engage with your content and give you feedback on it.

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