It is quite interesting to notice that so many marketers simply think about re-sharing old content without updating it. This is because these marketers are missing out on a great opportunity. The well-known SEO specialists often say that updating the old blog posts can help in increasing search engine traffic. However, this does not mean that you can simply update everything and expect a lot more traffic.
Old Blog Posts You Should Update
The obvious choice is the old blog posts that do already have good traffic coming in. That is especially the case when looking at older blogs. There are surely some posts that drive a large part of the SEO traffic the blog has. The only situation in which updating the older blog posts is not something that should be considered is when the blog is new or not much organic traffic is present. In this case just updating with highly relevant news would be a good approach.
Deciding on what blog posts to update or even how many you should update on a weekly/monthly basis is the tough part. All is based in so many cases on priorities and how much time is available to make the changes.
Things To Consider When Choosing What Blog Posts To Update:
- How much time would be needed to update the blog post versus the potential traffic increase you could get.
- How much money you would need to spend to update the post.
- How search volume evolved in the past few weeks – if you talk about a topic that is seeing a constant rise you can benefit from the update.
Things To Consider Changing
It is not always easy to add new content to an old blog post. Thankfully, you do not necessarily need to do this. There are many different ways to update older content. Some ideas to consider include:
- Changing Anchors – When you update the internal links or you build brand new external links, you will want to pay attention to the great performing older posts. Just be sure that you do not do it in a forced way as you can end up with lower value.
- On-Page Clean Up – Some time ago SEO was different. If you have an older blog there is a good possibility you did not know that much about search engine optimization or you used some artificial ranking methods that are simply not relevant at the moment. Updating the older blog posts by cleaning up broken links and removing outdated information is a great place to start.
- New Sub-Sections – One of the best updates you could do for an older blog post is to thicken the content. The idea is to add more useful information. You thus have the possibility to get more long tail SEO traffic to those posts.
- Adding Links – When you update the post you can incorporate more content with ease while you add some new external resources. Update the old data with brand new data (for instance an old survey with a new survey) or include brand new insights and research. Obviously, you can also add internal links that are relevant to content that appeared after the initial blog post date.
- Modify The Title – Since the competition is so much higher now than when you initially wrote the post, there is a pretty good possibility that working on the title tag will work really well as this will increase both CTR and rankigns.
- Improve How Linkable The Content Is – You can always make content more linkable. This is possible through various different methods from including an infographic to details about a new industry report.
