Post Publish Optimization SEO Case Study - Tweet After Death

Blog posts are tricky. Sometimes, writing a well-optimized post will land you views for many years down the

road. But occasionally, even a very well thought out blog post can be knocked down the rankings long term.

In June of last year, I wrote a post on how to schedule tweets after death. I was really happy with it. The picture was custom-designed by the honorable Steven Rosenbaum of SR-Graphics. The topic was fresh. 

The post was well-written. Livefyre’s interns shared it in their own feed. Death with Dignity had me as a guest for their live Twitter chat. And best of all, I got to share thoughts with interesting people about an interesting topic: what social media can do to help us communicate and what that means for our mortality and experience.

Out of curiosity, I Googled “tweet after death” last week to see where it came up. Articles from CBC, CNN, ANC, CBS, RT and a wealth of other media with strong sites essentially wrote the same story and knocked my article to page 2. (To be fair, one of them had quoted me).

I was grumpy about it. Here I had this innovative idea months before any major media and I was getting shoved to page two. I wanted to climb back onto the first page and stay there.

So I started sending out tweets with the post. I circulated it again in Google+, Facebook and chat boxes. I sent it on to colleagues, hoping that a little traffic would help push the thing up. And it did.

Exactly two ranks. Yay!

I realized that what I was doing was the last element of SEO for blog posts. While most people optimize their post before publishing, very few people optimize down the road and see if they still have their spot in the search rankings. Everyone PRE Publish Optimizes, but nobody POST Publish Optimizes (PoPO).

Here was an opportunity, and not just for regular monthly SEO campaigns, but for true strong outreach for a new concept. PoPO is a chance for SEO firms to rerun old blog posts in a chance to boost them in the rankings and retake ground in strategic fashion so as to own concepts in the mind of the blogosphere.

And when a post becomes too old to be relevant, the internet will have seen an era when old posts become less relevant and algorithms knock them down a peg or two. Then, PoPO will become even more essential, as the only way to control key SEO ground will be to swim through a sea of content and prove the relevance of your own over others.

From here, the water remains murky. How do traffic bumps and links to previous posts affect the long-term search rankings? This is the first mystery of PoPO. Without any data, it’s hard to know how you can help or hurt your blog and by how much with each action.

And, even more importantly, the Google algorithm is subject to updates that rearrange search rankings. To that end, PoPO’s future is uncertain. On the other hand, what is fairly certain is that reminding people of past posts as a way to keep traffic stored up may be an effective way to boost visibility.

What I like best about the concept is what I like best about most effective, worthwhile business tactics: finding resources others aren't using and capitalizing on them. PoPO is a chance for you to get amazing results while leaving your competitors in the dust. 

About the author: 

Daniel J. Cohen is the Founder and Lead Writer at RedShift Writers, a Houston-based content writing firm. RedShift Writers prides itself on creating content that is friendly for both search engines and customers. They offer a wide variety of message strategies and content writing services and specialize in web writing for product launches and energy companies.

To find out more about PoPO and how you can get the sharpest PoPO tacticians working on your SEO strategy, email RedShift Writers today.