After a few years of diligent blog writing, organizations end up accumulating a lot of blog content. The question is what to do with it all as it ages and gets buried deeper and deeper on your site and in the internet’s archives. In this article, we explain why and how to update blog posts.
In addition to its other uses, good blog content helps search engines rank your site higher so you get more site traffic. Then, when people do visit your site and find interesting content on your blog, they stay longer and click around more. This reduces your site’s bounce rate and boosts your clicks.
When you keep your content current in the context of what’s happening in your area of expertise and the world at large, it resonates better with your audience. The stronger the connection between you and your blog readers, the more conversions you’ll get and the more revenue you’ll earn.
There’s no denying that creating new, high-quality blog content is time-consuming. First, you have to come up with ideas, then you have to write them, edit them, produce them and share them around. It’s a lot faster to take what you’ve already done and update it to reflect current times and knowledge. So why wouldn’t you want to breathe new life into your tired, old posts?
First and foremost, set a schedule for periodic blog content review. Decide how often you will be refreshing your blog content. This will depend on the resources you have available. Many companies opt to undertake this kind of work during their slow season when there is more time for key staff to devote.
Don’t just randomly pick blog posts to update. Instead, identify the top candidates for updating and rank them to get the most out of your efforts. Google Analytics is a great tool for diving into your site stats and figuring out which older content has done and is still doing well. Prioritize your most popular content for a refresh; it gets the most eyeballs on it.
As you analyze your blog topics and stats, remember that you are going to keep the substance of your posts as you update them. Otherwise, they would be totally different posts.
Consider relevance when thinking about refreshing your blog content. Trends come and go, and what was old may be new again. But even for more dated posts that were once popular, there may be a way to update them to make them more inclusive and thus more popular again.
If you find posts that duplicate topics, consider merging them into one post. It’s not worth maintaining posts that rank low in organic search, and it keeps your similar content from competing against itself. Keep the URL of your most successful post.
Consider deleting blog topics that are not performing well, are about long past events, or are no longer relevant. Outdated posts can reflect badly on you and may negatively affect your reputation. They can even get you into legal trouble. Be on the lookout especially for any racist or sexist content.
When deleting a post for any reason, implement a redirect to send people to another relevant part of your site. You’ll avoid broken links on your own site and on those of others who have linked to you.
Speaking of broken links, updating links is one of the easiest steps in refreshing your blog content. Test every link on your site. Then remove or correct all broken links. Identify any new relevant links that you can incorporate. Such links may be to your own content or other site content; they all help with your rankings in search.
Be on the lookout for all kinds of outdated references. Delete or update references to people who are no longer culturally relevant or who have passed away; update names and titles that have changed due to marriage, divorce, promotions, etc.; and delete references and directions to contact people who are retired or no longer with your organization. Wherever possible, update old statistics with new information.
Replace relative time references such as “one year ago” with “in 2021,” and remove trendy cultural references that will quickly become unfashionable and seem dated.
Last but not least, check your tenses. For example, some present or future tense writing may need to be converted to present or past tense.
Review your content thoroughly with fresh eyes to find typos, mistakes, and unnecessary filler words. These can be quickly fixed to remove distractions for your readers.
Take a look at overall post readability and adopt web-friendly strategies like breaking up your text into smaller, easier-to-read and digest paragraphs. Shorter sentences and writing in an active voice instead of a passive voice are simple, yet essential, improvements you can implement.
There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a blog post and feeling like you want to engage through comments only to find a bunch of spam comments from internet trolls. Fortunately, it’s easy to go through old posts and delete irrelevant comments. In some cases, it may make sense to remove all old comments and start over with a blank slate for your updated post.
How a blog looks matters. Even if your website design has remained consistent since your original post, you may be able to freshen up the appearance of your blog posts. Enhance or swap out old photos for newer photos. Replace poor quality or low-resolution images with higher resolution, non-blurry images.
Look out for the use of old logos, brand colors, or images that are no longer relevant, like those featuring former team members.
Add in missing alt-image text to make your blog post “look good” to more people. Making your visuals more inclusive gives visually challenged site visitors a better experience when on your site.
What people call things can change over time. Look at what keywords you incorporated into your original post and see if those still come up in the most common keyword searches. Add in newer, more relevant keywords when applicable. Remember to put those keywords not only in your blog post text but also in its title tag, meta description, article title, and subheadings.
Update your blog post’s time stamp to your new publish date and time when republishing a blog post so your content will get bumped back up to the “top” of your site. If your site doesn’t automatically show that a post is updated vs. being new, or if you just want to give some more context, add a note to your readers. Customers like to see that you care enough to keep your blog content current, and they also appreciate it when you don’t pretend that something old is brand new.
Updating a blog post is a great excuse to get content back in front of people. Don’t worry about whether people are seeing something for the second or third time. People have short memories, and most of us appreciate seeing good content again. We might even pick up something different when re-reading an updated post.
Tell people as you are reposting articles on your blog by highlighting it on your site. Feature it on your social media channels and in your e-newsletter, and ask partners to help share it around. You can also request that Google re-index your post in its search results.
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Some content is evergreen and some isn’t, and there’s a lot in between. With just a bit of updating, you can get more out of the content in which you’ve already invested plenty of time, energy and money. Reposting articles on your blog will help you stay relevant in the minds of your current customers, and you might even generate some new business by doing so.
To learn more about blog best practices and how Cobalt helps companies with all aspects of content and blog writing, visit the Cobalt Content Creation + Marketing page, or contact the Cobalt team.
Check out another blog article of ours about how marketers and business professionals can get more mileage out of their content and do more with less.
Sue George
The original version of this page was published at: https://cobaltcommunications.com/cobalt-60/10-tips-for-refreshing-your-blog-content/
Cobalt works at the intersection of science and strategy, helping healthcare, medical, technology and scientific companies communicate more effectively with their internal and external audiences.
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