If you know anything about SEO, you know how important content is to your strategy. With blog posts, you can establish your authority over relevant topics in your industry and use them to optimize keywords and drive traffic to your website.
But a key factor of content that converts is that it must be fresh and evergreen.
The Benefits of Refreshing Old Content
1. Increase your traffic
Your content’s freshness affects how you appear on search engine results pages or SERPs. Search engines like Google use the freshness of a piece of content to judge its quality and whether it should be shown on the top of the first page.
In addition, users typically go for content published more recently. If they are looking for the benefits of sunscreen, for example, they will click on the blog post or article published recently since it’s more likely to contain new information.
With your updated blog pushed to the top of SERPs and your click-through rate increasing, you will see increased traffic to your website, which is an overall positive thing for your SEO efforts.
2. Keep your SEO up to date
Google updates its algorithm regularly, and these updates change ranking and traffic. Revisiting old content you’ve posted allows you to update it in keeping with the latest Google algorithm rules. As a result, Google indexes your fresh content and pushes it to the top of SERPs.
3. Do more with less
Creating content from scratch isn’t easy; a new piece of content will have to build authority over time. If you’ve had successful content in the past, updating it with relevant information and up to Google’s algorithm rules gives you results without investing too much effort.
How to Update Old Content
Now that you know why you should update old blog posts, it’s time to put in the work of updating them. Here’s how:
Step 1: Collect data
Run your website through Google Analytics and look at different metrics like bounce rate and time on the page. These pieces of information can help you decide which blogs to refresh.
Step 2: Identify pages to update
Once you have the relevant data, analyze it to determine the right pages to optimize. Ideally, it’s best to go for:
- High-traffic, low-conversion pages
- Low-traffic, high-conversion pages
- Former popular content
Step 3: Do keyword research
Keyword research is the backbone of any SEO strategy. The keywords you used before might differ from those relevant to your topic today. Doing keyword research lets you discover the correct phrases to target when you finally update your content.
Step 4: Update content
From improving your titles and fixing broken links to adding accurate data and checking for spelling errors, there are plenty of things you can do to update your old blog content.
Step 5: Update the post date
Finally, before clicking publish, change the post date of your refreshed content. This lets people and search engines know that your post contains the latest information.
Convert Through Content
Ready to transform your website’s blog posts? Content creation is a part of Sievers Creative’s organic SEO strategy. Discover how you can convert browsers into buyers through content with us. Get in touch today.
