When was the last time you visited an old blog post? While you are busy publishing new content weekly, posts that you’ve written 2 or more years ago often get buried in your history, never to be touched again. But these posts have a shelf life – 2 years.
They also have massive potential to increase traffic to your site.
With a few small adjustments, these old posts can be revived and used as a powerful tool in your SEO strategy.
So should you update your old blogs?
In short, absolutely. Even though you may not be visiting your content regularly, there is a good chance that Google and your audience are, especially high performing pages.
Old posts have the potential to boost and continue to boost your website traffic by making a few adjustments that are more relevant to your audience today.
We know that industry changes happen so often, that even a post from a year ago may already find itself outdated. Additionally, SEO practices also change very quickly so updating your blogs will ensure that your posts are incorporating the latest SEO techniques.
Visiting your content is like visiting your parents. It’s important because it keeps them young.
So let’s dive into some of the things you can do to refresh old blog content to make it new again:
1. Updating Backlinks
Updating old blog content creates an opportunity for you to share the latest news in your industry with your audience. This also means updating links that are no longer relevant and fixing ones that are broken.
2. Building Reader Loyalty
Whether it’s an article about digital marketing or how to brew the perfect cup of coffee, having the latest information helps us understand our choices today. Keeping your content updated provides insight that guides your audience to make decisions today, but also shows them that as a company, you are interested in providing value, not just creating content for the sake of it.
3. Combine Mid Tier Posts With High Performing Content
Mid-tier content is a great baseline for improvement. This tactic identifies mid-tier content that is performing, but not well enough, and combines it with higher performing articles. If both make sense when combined, take the research, backlinks and theme of the less performing post and use it to strengthen your well performing post. This lengthens your current blog post, eliminates the potential of duplicate content and enhances the quality of your current blog post.
4. Update the Year in the Heading Tag
If you are revamping evergreen content, you can simply update it by adding the current year to the heading tag. Just ensure that your brand references are current and up to date, and your backlinks are pointing to articles that have been published within the year. This will tell users that the information is still relevant today and it has been reviewed and approved for today’s climate.
Ie:
5. Make Your Title Tags More Clickable
Writing engaging and clickable headlines and title tags can play a role in whether or not they choose to continue reading. A good way to size up whether your headlines are optimized for click-throughs is to look into your Google Search Console and identify terms that are generating impressions for a specific page and use those keywords to write emotionally driven headlines and descriptions.
6. Redirect Your Audience
If your blog post is no longer relevant, or perhaps you’ve condensed your information into one, supercharged blog post instead, never delete your URL. Old URLs can increase the authority to your website, therefore deleting it is not best practice. Instead, use a 301 redirect to point the old blog post to the new one and pass on previously generated link equity.
7. First Impressions Matter
The introduction of your blog post is an opportunity to capture readers’ attention and encourage them to continue reading. Your introduction should be compelling, teasing benefits and leave a reader wanting to learn more. Instead of getting straight to the point, ease your way into your readers mind by revealing how you can help them and scatter the juicy information in the body of the text.
8. Rewrite and Revamp
The purpose of revisiting old blog posts is to review facts and procedures and revamp your old post with a fresh set of eyes. This means looking at your content with a current perspective and applying those changes where necessary. Be sure to adjust content to reflect current trends and technologies, remove old references and outdated brand mentions. Ask yourself, how would you tell the story today?
9. Promote Old Blog Posts
Don’t let the fear of duplicate content stop you from promoting newly updated blog posts. A refreshed post will have updated links, new text and information that your audience has yet to read. So, don’t shy away from posting it or perhaps sharing it with industry professionals as a point of reference.
How do you identify which posts need updating?
Update the posts with the most traffic first. If people are still reading your content, chances are that it is still relevant and sought after. Therefore ensuring this content is up to date, with updated links and updated information is important in having it convert higher and focusing on areas that are relevant to your audience.
Filter out your content to identify which blogs are close to striking but need a push to get there. Blogs that are ranking on the second page of the search results, and blogs that have a lot of impressions but need additional optimization should be added to your list.
Should You Update Old Blog Posts?
When you leave old blog posts to sit in your history, you are potentially missing an opportunity to convert and engage a new audience. Additionally this is a great opportunity to create new backlinks, refresh old content, and keep your website relevant and encourage a larger audience to continue reading and clicking on your website.
Want to chat? Get in touch today! We’re excited to hear from you.