Did you know that blog posts have a ‘shelf life’ of only two years? This is why your blog traffic decreases over time and why Search Engines like Google, stop ranking those pages when they get old!
So why should you care about aging blog posts? Experts suggest that 61-80% of their site’s organic traffic comes from “old” blog posts. The same experts from databox also reported that over 90% of their leads come from this “old” content. Therefore, it would make sense to optimise the content of those blog posts first, before you go writing new ones every week, in order to increase traffic and leads.
5 steps to help you update old blog posts to improve SEO
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Decide on the blog posts you want to update
Focus on old content that used to perform well and has now lost traffic or has gone down the rankings. The aim is to optimise content that is directly related to your product or service and make it relevant to your reader. An easy way to identify posts that used to be top-performers but now need updating, is to compare your impressions and CTR by using Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
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Remove content that is out of date
After selecting the posts to be edited, start removing any outdated information, such as statistics that are no longer accurate, references to any organisations that have closed down or to products that are no longer available etc. The most important step here would be removing broken or outdated links, so our next tip dives deeper into what you can do.
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Remove broken links and add new ones
Broken links hurt both SEO and user experience. Locating broken links on your blog is very easy with a broken link checker tool or browser extension. Once you locate these, you can delete them and look for a replacement. Ideally, you can add links to other relevant pages on your site, so that you bring traffic to these as well. This way you also keep users on your site and direct them to pages relevant to them - like this!
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Update old and add new media
It’s important to also update or add videos and images on old blog posts, as these will keep users on your page longer. You can optimise images for SEO by ensuring that the names of the files contain relevant keywords and the images have correctly formatted alt text. The illustration below from Salesforce provides some guidelines on how to properly add media for SEO.
Conclusion
Don’t let all the hard work you put into old blog posts go to waste. Regularly revise and update old content to keep it relevant for readers. It will increase your organic traffic and help you bring in some new leads without having to write yet another blog post.
The above are just a few of the things you can do, so stay tuned for Part 2 to find out more!
Do you have a website and want to make it to the top of search results pages? Our SEO service can help, so let’s talk! 🤘
Sources:
https://www.textrequest.com/blog/update-old-blog-posts-improve-seo/
https://databox.com/how-to-update-old-blog-posts-for-seo
https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/blogs/ca/Blog%20Posts/anatomy-of-a-blog-post.jpg
