Breath New Life into Old Blog Posts

So you’ve got your website polished and running like a well-oiled machine, churning out blog posts every week. After months of hard work, you finally start getting rankings for these posts.

AAAH!  the sweet smell of success!

Fast forward a year, and all of a sudden traffic to your blog posts starts taking a massive nose dive! What happened, and more importantly how do you fix this?

In this article, we will look at how you can grow your SEO traffic by breathing new life into your old blog content.

Why is it important to update old blog post

The simple truth is that the web is flooded with tons of content every day. Competition is fierce. If your content is fresh, unique, and relevant you stand a half-decent chance of getting traffic. The problem is though, that all content has a shelf life. As soon as you publish, the timer starts ticking. As time passes the information becomes stale, or not accurate anymore. Traffic to your site starts to dip, and google starts ranking your site lower to make space for new blog posts.

For Google, User experience is more important than any other factor. Usually, this means content that is fresh, up to date, and the most relevant. What google call E.A.T. Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

How do you decide what blog posts to update?

As we know, not all blog posts are created equal. Every website has evergreen content with information that doesn’t change. If you have a Vintage auto mechanic business for example, with a post on, “How to install brake lights on a 1960 Impala” this information is not likely to change over time. If the relevancy of the information in your post is more variable as time goes by, however, this is a completely different story. 

Traffic changes to your blog posts are your best weapon in identifying what posts need updating. Google Search Console is a great tool to be able to quickly identify what blog posts are losing traffic over a period of time. Once you have identified the posts that have lost traffic you can dig a bit deeper into each post to identify what elements need updating.

Factors to consider when updating your old blog posts

Competing posts

Once you identified one of your posts with reduced traffic, you can use Google Search Console to see what keyword terms you were being searched for. Next, you need to google these keywords to see what posts are ranking above you. Now you click into each of these posts to analyze what makes these posts better than yours. 

10 x Better content

Once you have identified what your competition does better, make sure you modify your content to not only include the elements they have but do it in a 10 x more unique and creative way. Look at your blog post with a current perspective. Take current trends, technologies, and events into account, and apply changes where necessary. Delete any information that is no longer relevant.

Publish Date

 When updating an article make sure you update the publish by date. This allows search engines to know your blog has been updated, and users are more likely to click on your link because the date indicated it is current.

User Experience

Make sure you always keep the User Experience top of mind. Obsess less about reaching a specific word count on a blog post. It is far more important to focus on identifying and including elements to your blog that will keep users there, engaged, and interested. This might be as simple as additional images, or a short video.

Update Backlinks

Make sure all links on your blog are still relevant and working properly. This is also a great opportunity to add new links to your blog of more relevant sites with high authority.

Title Tags and Meta descriptions

Make sure you analyze your title tags and meta descriptions with what your competitors are doing in mind. Your title tag is the first thing your target audience sees. Ensure that it is engaging and clickable. Make sure you utilize Google Search Console and identify terms that are producing impressions for a specific page, and use those terms to write engaging titles and descriptions.

Don’t change your URL

By changing your URL, you might end up losing a bunch of build-up page authority. If you really are dead set on changing your URL, make sure you 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. Once completed making sure to update it in Google Search Console, and request it to be indexed.

Conclusion

Updating old blog posts can seem like an overwhelming task on your own. You don’t want to run the risk of changing elements and falling even further in terms of traffic to your post. NAV43 is a specialist in the area of blog post updating. Our team is ready to help you analyze which blog posts need updating, and how to best utilize current on-page elements to get traffic to your post.

Call us today. We are eager to help.