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    How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

    How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

    Updating your blog posts will be good for SEO. One important for Google’s algorithm is Freshness when ranking the results, thus updating your old blog posts as well as republishing them will boost your online rankings, driving improved traffic to the old posts. Creating a better user experience will be key when you are using the content to generate more leads. There are some respondents who reported that over 90% of the leads come generally from the “old” content: Lastly, updating your old blog posts will be good for the content creator. Thus, updating your old blog posts will drive some huge benefits: increased rankings, better user experience, as well as improved results with very little effort.

    Why is this important for updating your old blog posts for SEO?

    Relevance is the important factor that will determine the blog post’s SEO ranks—as well as relevance, which is generally determined by the post’s published date, useful content, and if it is updated. Thus, if you have got any older posts that have done well, you have to ensure that you keep this relevant with the published updates, and the traffic & Page Authority stay very high. The updated post, which was earlier successful on the blog can generally rank much higher in the searches than the new post, as you are building off the authority that a successful post has accumulated.

    Updates tell the Google algorithm your content is the better resource and will increase the blog post’s traffic by 70%, depending on certain things.

    The blog has a solid Domain Authority

    The Domain Authority is a score that predicts how nicely the page can rank on the search engine web pages. Anything around 40 to 50 will be considered an average, whereas anything more than 60 is observed as excellent.

    Blog channels steady traffic

    What counts as “steady” will differ between the industry or how much traffic matters to you. Let us take a reference, an average blog gets 130 page views per day, and 4,000 page views per month. We knew that our blog had hit a steady traffic amount when we got 400 – 500 views per day from the organic search.

    The blog has got evergreen topics

    Here evergreen refers to something that has got continuous value as well as does not rely on timeliness. For instance, “How you can improve SEO” is an evergreen topic, whereas “Last month’s Google updates” isn’t. Suppose your blog struggles a lot to do three things, you have to focus more on reaching such goals before trying to update or republish the blog posts.

    Add any internal links

    As you have published the post, probably you have published some other posts, which are related to the topic. Now, you can add some internal links to more recent posts, and suggested reading to the end of the post, or link up old posts in the series. Here your main goal is to keep your visitors on the website, reading many other articles. So, whatever other content the reader will find useful on your website, link them here.

    Update multimedia and images

    It is a good idea to update multimedia, not only the content. You might have to update any featured post image and comply with the new social media standards, be more consistent with the current branding, or give this the refresh and stay attractive to the readers. You might choose to add the new multimedia, such as creating infographics and videos based on post info to draw in the new audience.

    Review call to action

    Is your blog post having any outdated CTA? Perhaps you have removed the comments from the blog, but have got posts ending asking readers for leaving their comments. Or you wish to add the new CTA to reflect the new blogging goals, like building the email list. Ensure that CTA you are using is appropriate as well as fits with the current blogging goals.

    Republish your post

    When your post gets updated, you may select to change its date as well as republish it, thus your readers can be quite sure to see the updated version. You might have to add a quick note on the top so that you do not confuse the long-time readers who recognize this post. For re-publishing the post, enter the post screen from the dashboard. In a Publish box on a right, click on Edit under the date. You may change this to the current date & hit “Update” for republishing your post to the first page.

    Written by Aayush
    Writer, editor, and marketing professional with 10 years of experience, Aayush Singh is a digital nomad. With a focus on engaging digital content and SEO campaigns for SMB, and enterprise clients, he is the content creator & manager at SERP WIZARD.