How to update old blog posts | updating old content SEO benefits

Given that, you do spend considerable time, energy, and money in creating the right content, primarily for SEO. You would also have plenty of old content that did exceptionally well to be miserable when you published it for the first time. But the efforts continue.

We get so focused on creating new content that we completely forget about the old published content. By doing this, you let go of a powerful tool to boost your organic traffic – updating old content SEO.

Would you not love a good hack that makes your task easy and yield more profits to your business? Refreshing content for SEO is precisely that magical hack. How? Read our comprehensive guide to know everything about it.

Table of Contents

Importance of Updating Old Blog Posts SEO

Before we dig into and learn the art of updating old content SEO, let us first understand the importance and benefit of updating old blog posts SEO.

Your old blog has achieved a substantial domain authority:

A Domain Authority is a score that helps you to predict your page’s ranking on search engine pages. Its average score value is 40 to 50. The score value above 60 is excellent and is the aim of all SEO efforts.

When you had previously published the content, the page would have attracted traffic and achieved a substantial domain authority especially if it was successful. The updated content refreshes the page, and you can reap new benefits from the page. The fierce competition in the digital space needs no introduction. You might be wringing your bones to drive organic traffic to your website and boost your business sales. The crucial weapon in this is the content on your website.

Your blog enjoys steady traffic:

Publishing content to attract traffic is a continuous process. Gradually, you are able to attract steady traffic to your website. Now updating old content SEO is far easier and cheaper than creating new content. The updated content refreshes the page, and your traffic does not wane. Instead, it takes an upward curve. You are thus able to keep your traffic steady and increasing.

Prevents a weak post from hurting your entire blog:

We all publish a significant amount of content to attract organic traffic. But these are not human error-proof. Despite our best efforts, a few of our posts manifest as weak posts that do not yield the desired results. Moreover, outdated information, old posts tend to hurt the ranking of your website.

But when you optimize old content, you are able to eliminate all errors, be it of grammar and spelling, content information, relevance, etc. This way, your content keeps up with time and remains engaging to the target audience. It not only stops any damage to your blog but also helps in attracting more traffic.

Old pages rank well:

Not many people know that pages present in Google’s index for a very long time have high ranking power. But this power goes down the drain if you are not updating old content SEO.

Be it a blogger or a business owner; all are aware of the hardships of creating new content and ranking new pages on Google. It can be time-consuming as well. But by updating old blog posts SEO, you can quickly get a sudden ranking boost.

Boosts your SEO:

It goes without saying that your website’s ranking on Google search pages plays a crucial role in your business success. The higher your website is on the result page, the higher the chance of your content being discovered, leading to more traffic to your website.

For Google, EAT is a crucial factor. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. With updated content, you improve your EAT score. It makes Google crawl your page more and inevitably improves your page’s ranking and visibility. In a nutshell, if you optimize old content, you boost your SEO efforts in the easiest manner.

Improved and increased backlinks:

Backlinks play a crucial role in increasing the authority and trustworthiness of your website and improving its SERP rating. With each blog post, we try to procure backlinks from authority sites. But as your blog goes old, the backlinks lose its impact, and many get broken.

The reason for this is simple. Linking with outdated content yields no value. But by refreshing and updating it, it increases its value and relevance. All broken links get eliminated. Moreover, the content attracts new links, thereby improving the value of your website and attracting new traffic.

Freshness factor:

Very few know or pay attention to Google’s Freshness Factor. It is a small but crucial part of Google’s search engine algorithm. It is an important element that Google uses to decide on the quality of the content. Moreover, this applies not only to your content but to the whole website.

Hence, if you are updating old content SEO, you are not only refreshing a particular blog but also your whole website. It inevitably leads to better page ranking, increased traffic, and better conversions.

Builds the reader’s loyalty:

Once the content has been published, there always remains a possibility that your audience might land on that outdated content. That could adversely impact your business. But by updating old content SEO, you invoke trust and loyalty from the customers.

It is because the updated content leaves them with the impression that your content creation is not flimsy but meant to provide value and insight. It incites admiration and helps build brand value and loyalty.

There are plenty of other benefits, but we have highlighted just a few. They should be sufficient to help you erase doubts about should you update old blog posts. In a nutshell, it is less time-consuming, less effort taking, and a better result yielding tool.

The Life Span of a Blog Post

Before we get down to the dynamics of how to update old blog posts, let us first understand the life span of a blog post. You might be surprised to know that a blog post is like any other product with a definite life span. The knowledge would help you decide the exact time about what to do with old blog posts.

According to experts, a blog post reaches its peak in two years. Within those two years, a blog typically goes through three stages.

Stage 1: Shout

The time-span of this first stage is the initial seven to ten days following the post’s first release. Here, the post receives a sharp increase in impressions, primarily because of high sharing on social media and newsletters for the first time. In this stage, a blog post collects almost 50% of its impressions.

Stage 2: Echo

This stage starts after the end of the first stage and has an average timespan of about a month. Here, you typically see a gradual drop in impressions, and the sharing of blog posts gets declined. Here, the impressions account for about 72% of its total impressions.

Stage 3: Reverberate

It is the remaining time-span of the two years post end of the second stage and is approximate 700 days. Here, you get a mere 28% of the total blog’s impressions. While this stage is the least researched of all the three stages, it allows for maximum room for growth. Ideally, you should be updating old content SEO anytime during this stage. You can update the content at the end of two years as well.

Strategies to Bring Old Content to Life

Millions of blog posts get created every day. But all are not of the same quality and have the same worth. Some are more in-depth or are more shareable, have a higher conversion rate or some have resonated better with readers. Hence, you cannot take any blog and update its content. It will not give you the required results. Before we get into the valuable tips of how to update old blog posts, let us understand a few strategies that you must always apply before updating old content SEO.

Content curation:

The foremost thing that you need to do is the content curation of all your old blog posts. It will help you know what to do with old blog posts better.

For this, you first need to make a list of all your old blog posts. You need to compile their URL or title. The job might look daunting, but thanks to analytics software like Google Analytics, you can do it effortlessly. It would help you collect all the data on relevant metrics about any blog.

Decide on the metrics:

We have already stated that while Google Analytics gives you a detailed report on few crucial metrics, you can use data from other sources as well or other software to get the data on any metrics that might be important for your business.

Next, you need to decide on the metrics that you want to take advantage of for your business. For instance, it might be traffic, conversion rate, click-through, or any other parameter. It increases your focus and helps you decide what to do with old blog posts.

Choose the posts to prioritize:

Once you have collected the data and selected your metrics, the rest of the job becomes easy. Based on the data and metrics, you can now compile a list of blog posts you can update. All the chosen blog posts would be meeting your metrics like having the highest conversion rate, or best click-through or any other parameter decided by you.

Tips to Update Old Blog Posts for Maximum Benefit

We are now ready to update old blog posts SEO. While partnering with expert firms like us remains your best bet, we do share some tips that would prove invaluable and help you reap maximum benefits from it.

Choose posts that are performing well or need the most help:

The selection of blog posts for updating is crucial to the success or failure of your endeavor. It’s best to make the choice after a lot of research and brain-storming. We have already touched upon it earlier. You can either choose to consolidate a blog post that has already been doing well. Else you can select a post that went haywire and could do with a makeover.

For most, the mid-performing content is also a good bet. These are content that did not work to the level expected. Improving them could yield great results. Depending on your business goals, you can choose a blog post for updated content.

Remove outdated information:

Next, we look into the content of the blog post microscopically. If you spot any outdated information, it is essential to remove it from there. It will ensure that your content is current and relevant to present times and would remain engaging to the audience. Few things that you can eliminate can be

Outdated statistics.
Outdated, irrelevant, or broken links.
Business and organization mention that have closed down or gained a bad reputation.
Timeline mentions, ‘It has been a year since the incident,’ etc.
Meme or pop culture references that have become old and obsolete.

Add the current year to the heading tag:

The meta title and the H1 title is the first thing that any reader comes across when searching for any content. Changing the title to current times and add the current year date while updating old content SEO increases the authority and trustworthiness of the repurposed content. Hence, it is one of the best practices for updating website content and any other blog post content.

Add and update media:

Images and media are something that keeps the visitors hooked to your page. In fact, experts suggest adding a video or an image for every 350 words in any post or blog. You might need to change the image to make it more relevant and format them appropriately. The videos must always be the latest.

Increase the post’s word count:

Statistics show that long-form content always performs better than short ones. Thus, it is a great move to increase the word count of the blog post. But you must also ensure that each word adds value and information.

Few things you can add to increase the bulk of the blog post can be in-depth details, case studies, steps, and even comments from experts.

Remove and add links:

As your content gets old, its links get broken and lose their value. It will definitely hurt your SEO attempts and take your page ranking lower. Hence, it’s vital to eliminate all old and obsolete links and add new links from authority sites. The caution you need to take is that the link comes from a page of high authority and content relevant to your blog post title.

Optimize your URL:

The optimization of the URL is critical for better SEO ranking. We have already talked about the inclusion of dates. The other factors to look into are that it is structured and coherent, is not too long or has irrelevant words, lacks keywords, etc.

Revisit the keyword targeting:

A critical scan that you must do is check if the keyword is ranking well or not. The keyword optimization would elevate your SEO success appreciably. If required, you can adjust the content and use better keywords.

Check out the page speed:

The page speed is a critical parameter in SEO ranking. The average time for a page load is three seconds, but the best speed is always under one second. If your page is taking more than three seconds to load, you need to optimize the page speed. According to studies, about 40% of visitors abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

For it, you can do a few things like compressing image files, optimizing the website for mobiles and tablets, leveraging browse caching, adding expired headers, etc.

Resubmit the page in Google Search Console:

Once you have made all the changes and updated the content, you must resubmit the revamped page in Google Search Console. It will increase the probability of Google crawling your page and reindexing it on a priority basis for better ranking.

Use social and email marketing tactics to increase the traffic:

Once the content has been published, your focus must shift on its propagation to increase the traffic to your website. One of the most popular tactics have been social and email marketing and that should not be compromised upon.

Regularly share content on social media.

The power of social media is no longer underestimated. You, too, must share the revamped content on various social media platforms for maximum attention and advertisement.

Control the navigation

Controlling the navigation also leads to good SEO results. Few options include links in the sidebar, links in the menu, links below the post, etc. It will inevitably add plenty of content to your content and make the page more engaging for the readers.

Wrapping up

We hope, by now, you realize what a gold mine your old blog posts are and how you can reap benefits from it again by updating its content. The trick is in balancing between good SEO and solid content.

For further help and guidance, do get in touch with us today and optimize your content for the best results. We look forward to partnering with you in your business success.

How to update old blog posts | Updating old content SEO benefits