More often than not, when someone lands on your blog post this could be the first interaction with your website. This is a virtual door to your business. But are you making the most of that virtual door? And is it that post the most reflective of your service or product right now?
Updating your old blog posts is good for a few reasons:
Updating your blog content is a surefire way of improving your SEO fast. Google appreciates and rewards fresh content. If you are time-poor you don’t have the time to write brand-new blog posts every day. This is a clever approach to working on your website SEO.
Republishing old content allows you to make it better, provide more in-depth information, and optimize the in-post SEO.
When it comes to choosing which blog posts to update you can approach it in two different ways.
You could look to improve your existing content. The content bringing the most amount of traffic to the website but not converting well.
Or.
You could choose to go in search of the low-hanging fruit. Content that has the ability to rank better in the SERPS. The content that can bring more traffic to your website.
Neither approach is wrong, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Remember Google Analytics is your friend! We all forget to check our stats but your analytics gives you so much data. It's designed to help you make informed decisions.
Head into your analytics and do the following…
The second option is to dive right into Google and look at how your content is performing in the SERPS. [we would always recommend doing this in a private or incognito window]
Do you have content on page two of Google that could simply improved to push it higher up the ranks? What content is on page one above you? When did they last update their content?
Do you have posts towards the bottom of the page that are at risk of being outranked soon? Could you improve on those?
And which of your posts are currently showing up on the first page of Google but clearly display out of date information? Could these be freshened up?
Now you have your starting list of content to update now is the time to think about what improvements you can make. Here are a few things to consider...
Google loves detailed articles. It wants to offer the most fitting answer to a user's search queries. So any extra information or exploration of a topic you can offer is going to help your blog on its way to greatness.
Take the time to wisely edit your content. Are there sections that are no longer relevant? What can you expand on now with new experience and expertise in your field?
There is no hard and fast answer on how much more content you should write for your audience. Make sure it is the best version it can be, based on present day.
How to optimize a blog post for SEO
The same thing goes for stats and infographics. If you wrote your blog post 3 years ago, are there more up-to-date statistics you could include? Stats that are more helpful to your readers?
Not only are you improving your user experience and engagement on your blog. By updating your images and videos, you are increasing your SEO opportunities too.
Don’t forget to ensure that you always include ALT text on the back of your images. This will help boost your opportunity on the image search on Google.
How to add ALT text to your images
We always talk about the importance of keyword optimization in your posts. We don’t recommend you change your focus keyword on a post that is already performing. But this is an opportunity to layer the rest of your post with secondary keywords related to your topic.
There are so many keyword tools that you can use to help you to search. Google Keyword Planner is a brilliant starting place if you are looking for a free option to get started.
Your links are one of the most important things to check when updating your current blog post. Nobody likes to get an awkward 404 error message from a page link that's broken.
We recognize that website pages change and evolve. Even though we all have the best intentions, we don’t always redirect our pages properly. We’re all human after all!
Check your post for any broken links. You can either do this manually or the following tools can help you.
Google Search Console- search for crawl errors
AHREFS free broken backlink checker.
This is also a great time to think about the internal link structure of your website. Do you have more recent content that you can link to within your post? Have you updated your pillar posts?
And most importantly, as you look at the call to actions placed within the post, are they relevant to your current business goal?
If your blog post doesn’t help to feed into your current conversion you might want to change this. That lead magnet you created back in 2015 may not be the most helpful anymore.
Your metadata is super important. It’s the thing that helps someone decide whether to click on a search result or not. Check your descriptions and objectively ask if you would click on your article or not. Don’t forget to answer someone's search intent with your description. And include a keyword where possible.
When you hit the update button on your post, ensure that you are publishing with your new time and date. Not with the date of the original post. Not only will this help flag to Google that you have fresh content, but it will help your readers assess whether your content is going to be helpful to them.
The bit that everyone forgets to do. You've told your email list, you've told your LinkedIn audience [ or insert any other social media platform] but you've forgotten to tell Google you have new content!
Re-indexing your content is crucial to ensure that you are ranking as fast as you can with your content. Once you have hit the publish button remember to take your newly updated post URL over to Google Search Console and paste it into the URL inspection tool to request indexing.
Don’t forget that it's your responsibility to tell your audience about your updated content. Ensure you add this to your social media plan and tell your audience that you have something for them to read/ watch that will be helpful to them!
Your content is ever-evolving and needs to be working harder for you. If you’re not updating your content you are missing an opportunity to convert your web traffic.
Your blog is a shop window to your business. Make sure it represents you the way it should be, not the way you were five years ago!