The Value of Refreshing Old Blog Posts
If you have been blogging or running your website for quite some time, chances are your blogging platform or website has outdated blog posts.
Refreshing old blog posts is as important as creating new ones to attract new and relevant audiences and drive organic traffic to your website. Updating and optimizing outdated content can help maintain your website’s relevancy and improve its ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Page Result ).
Also, if your website aims to drive targeted traffic and increase the conversion rate, renewing old content is critical to improving your website’s relevance and authority, which can help build trustworthiness among your potential customers.
Let’s dive deeper into the key benefits of refreshing old blog posts and updating content.
Top 3 advantages of refreshing old blog posts
1. It is an intelligent, effort-saving content-creation tactic.
Upgrading existing content is one of the best time-saving tactics for maximizing your website traffic and engagement compared to creating fresh blog posts from scratch. Refreshing the content in an old blog post will result in Google's crawler getting fresh content on your website and may lead to a better blog ranking on search engines.
2. It can enhance the performance of your on-page SEO
If your blog was published long ago, you might observe that many new competitors’ blogs are trying to rank for the same search query. You can check this yourself by doing a simple Google search.
For instance, if you search for ‘ Beauty trends,’ you’ll see the newest published content (published in the current year or past year) at the top of the SERP.
To enhance the performance of your on-page SEO, you need to devise a clever SEO strategy by analyzing the queries your blog is showing and the competitors' targeted keywords. Based on your research, you need to create better responses to the search query to improve ranking, drive more organic traffic, and give your website a tremendous SEO boost.
3. Build an authoritative website.
Refreshing old blog posts entails critical facets like fixing grammatical and spelling mistakes, improving scannability, removing unnecessary or obsolete information, and creating fresh, relevant content. As per the Google metrics, all these factors are essential to improve your ranking on the SERP and build an authoritative website.
While grammar doesn’t directly impact Google ranking, it is a tangible reflection of the content quality and can impact the reputation of your website or services amongst users.
So, creating grammatically correct and quality content is essential to reduce the bounce rate and improve user engagement.
Also, Google loves fresh and relevant content. This is well proved by the following graph that represents Ahrefs' jump in their rankings after they introduced the concept of evergreen content and their regular content refreshing regime.
And lastly, while you are focusing on refreshing your content, ensure that the new content you are adding is accurate.
Google constantly works on its algorithms to enhance the user experience. So, by ensuring your content is accurate and providing unique insights into the relevant search query, you can improve the user experience significantly. And, in succession, you can experience your Google rank skyrocketing!
Three quick steps for identifying outdated blog posts
Now that we have discussed the striking benefits of refreshing old blog posts, the next question that arises is, how to identify the blogs that need revision? So, the following are some important steps to follow to identify the old blogs that have a scope for improvement.
1. Leverage website analytics to identify pages experiencing reduced user engagement or low traffic, as these parameters indicate that the content is not providing enough value to the reader.
2. Pay heed to the feedback or comments received from users. If you notice many users asking for more information, consider revising your content.
3. Assess the competition and see what content your competitors are creating. If you identify any existing content that is not at par or better than the content your competitors have published, your content calls for revision.
Five essential tips to refresh your old blog posts for SEO
Here we come to the last leg of our critical topic under discussion. In this section, let’s understand a couple of important tactics that can help you revise the outmoded content on your website, improve your page/website ranking on the SERP, drive more organic traffic to your website, and improve customer retention and conversion rates.
Analyze the trending keywords and competitors’ performing keywords.
After identifying the blogs that need updating, understand visitors’ intent to your website and analyze the terms or phrases that are popularly searched for. These are nothing but your keywords!
At the same time, leverage the keyword research tools to identify your competitors’ performing keywords. Based on this research, devise an impactful SEO keyword strategy to revise outdated and irrelevant content on your website.
Fix issues pertaining to the latest Google updates.
Google algorithms evolve perpetually, and as per Searchmetrics, Google executes as many as 600 updates and adaptations to its algorithms each year.
It is thus essential for you to ensure that your old content adheres to the latest changes implemented by Google to better your chances of attaining SEO success.
Add relevant internal links and external links to the post.
Adding relevant internal and external links to old blog posts is a crucial part of SEO optimization. Internal links allow readers to navigate easily between different landing pages of your site and enable Google crawlers to find the other relevant pages on your website. This helps spread link juice throughout your website.
External linking is equally important as they improve the credibility of your website and build trust among visitors. Also, it helps search engines better understand your post and thus develop your website’s authority.
Add multimedia to your old blog posts.
Adding multimedia elements such as images, videos, infographics, and audio clips to old blog posts can improve the visibility of your post, improve the overall user experience and improve the average time spent on page metrics.
Additionally, multimedia elements can help make the content more readable and make it easier for search engine crawlers to index the content and improve your page ranking.
Be wary of other critical parameters as well.
Once you have refreshed your old content, optimize other crucial aspects like title, URL, and meta description for better SEO performance.
Wrapping Up
We have discussed the essential aspects regarding refreshing the old blog posts. But, if you have any doubts about how to implement SEO effectively for your website, feel free to seek help from the adept SEO and Content Marketing team at Klusster Media to take care of all your SEO needs and take your business to greater heights.