As you are the owner of a business blog, you might find yourself wondering quite frequently how you can attract more readers to your blog. It’s human nature to want to make something totally original when puzzling over a solution. Every time you refresh your feed, there’s a new article covering the latest fad, describing the latest innovation, or breaking down the latest technique.
In order to achieve blog success, updating your old posts is a great way to attract a lot of new readers to your blog. Although this is very important for your blog traffic, it is often a concept that is overlooked. In this post, we’ll explain the value of regular blog updates and show you how to incorporate this strategy into your own blog.
Importance of Updated Blog Posts
We are always on the lookout for fresh content ideas as content marketers and bloggers in the hopes that they will help us engage our audience and set us apart from the competition. It’s easy to overlook the fact that we may already be sitting on a treasure trove of material that could be brought back to life with a bit of polishing. For business blogs, in particular, older posts frequently constitute the bulk of their readership.
Why Updating Old Blog Posts is a Great Idea?
If you want to see a huge return on investment for your company, consider giving your old blog posts a new lease on life. Here are some of the benefits of updating your old blog posts.
- Getting More Views and Higher Positions
- Using your time more efficiently
- Constructing a More Satisfying User Interface
- Preserving Brand Consistency
1. Getting More Views and Higher Positions
You can get fantastic search engine optimization results from updating an old blog post. Following an initial trial run of republishing blog posts after being updated, you will be seeing an increase in organic CTR to your previous posts.
Hubspot has done this and as a result, the average amount of organic traffic to the republished posts increased by a whopping 106%.
2. Using your time more efficiently
Constant effort is required to keep a steady stream of fresh, high-quality blog posts coming out. New ideas that are worth developing must be selected, and then research and development must be followed by original creation.
Meanwhile, updating an old post is much easier and requires less effort without sacrificing effectiveness. If you swap out some of the brand new pieces on your content calendar for updates to existing posts, you’ll free up time for your content team.
Simply put, you need to put in more smart work and less hard labor.
3. Constructing a More Satisfying User Interface
We’ve all been frustrated by the experience of clicking through to an article only to find that it’s out of date, inaccurate, or all three. When something like this occurs, we usually don’t stick around for very long. Instead, we go back to SERP in the hopes of finding a different page that will better answer our needs.
The best way to prevent this from happening is to update your older posts so that visitors no longer feel dissatisfied with the information they find on your site.
4. Preserving Brand Consistency
It’s only natural for your company’s brand identity and target demographic to change as time goes on.
Still, this could mean that some of your older blog posts were written for a different audience, in the tone of voice (TOV) of a different brand, or with different formatting and design rules.
By updating these articles often, you can get rid of any inconsistencies and make sure that your whole online persona matches the values of your brand.
Improving Inbound Traffic and Conversions
Revamping an old blog post can increase not only traffic but also conversion rates. After the data has already been acquired for the older posts. It will be easier to analyze this data to see arease for improvement in your posts.
As an example; in older threads, you may find offers to sign up that are no longer relevant or active. It is recommended to correct this when you refresh your post. If the current sign-up incentive doesn’t fit the post’s topic, you can swap it out for something else, such as an updated piece of content or an ebook on the subject.
The best signup incentive is the one that reflects the user’s motivation for finding the post in the first place, so keep that in mind when crafting your message. In this way, you can increase the number of potential customers you speak with.
Which Blog Entries Should I Revise and Why?
You need to do some reconnaissance work by reviewing your analytics and conducting a quick content audit before deciding which older posts to revive.
You should start by figuring out how popular your current posts are, how well they rank for specific keywords, and how much traffic they currently receive.
Go to your Google Analytics account to view the number of people who have seen your posts. For each blog entry, the most important metrics to track are organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate and dwell time.
You can see how well each post is doing for a given set of keywords by using Google Search Console.
Here Are Some Indicators That Your Blog Post Needs an Update
Once you have collected all of your archived posts, along with data on their traffic, keywords, and rankings, you can begin choosing which ones to optimize.
A lot of different things can be posted. A modernization will help some more than others.
Choosing posts that fulfill any of the following requirements will maximize your return on investment:
1. High Traffic But High Bounce Rate
A post that gets a fair amount of traffic but has a high bounce rate and a low time on page is an indicator that it could use an update. Even though there is a high level of interest in the subject, the post itself often falls short of the mark and disappoints its audience. Without revisions, this kind of post will continue to suffer from low engagement metrics, which will eventually cause it to fall in the search engine rankings and attract fewer readers.
2. Declining Rankings
Declining rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) is a clear indication that a post needs to be revised (search engine results pages). This may indicate that superior content on the same topic has been published by competitors. In that case, you must improve your own post by making it more valuable to your audience.
Check the page authority of each post to see which one to prioritize if you have several that are dropping in the rankings. Once you’ve made some changes to the content, the page with the higher authority will likely move back up the rankings more quickly than the other one.
3. Content That Converts Well
One strategy for deciding which posts to optimize is to give special attention to the ones that are already responsible for the most conversions. Increased traffic to a page that converts well is the holy grail of online marketing.
4. Content on the First-Page Results
If you can improve your standing, do so even if you’re already on the first page. Any improvement on the first page can have a significant impact on your click-through rate (CTR), so it’s always worthwhile to assess what you can do to make your content superior to the competition.
Even if you’re already at the top of page one, your rivals will do whatever they can to push you down the rankings. Maintain your lead by improving upon your previous excellent post.
5. You Are On The Verge of Showing Up On The First Page
It’s common knowledge that only a tiny fraction of searchers ever click on results that appear on page two. Only 0.78 percent of searchers click on a second-page result, per data compiled by Backlinko. However, even the tenth-placed result on the first page receives a click-through rate of 3.09% on average. The organic click-through rate is highest for the first result on Google.
Posts on page two are ideal candidates for an update, as a promotion to page one significantly increases reader interest.
6. Articles With Low Amount of Backlinks
Make sure all of your links are working properly before publishing anything online. Search engine results page (SERP) rankings may be negatively impacted by broken links, which can be quickly detected by Google’s web crawlers. Checking your posts with high-quality backlinks from external authority websites is an important SEO best practice for content. If you find that these articles aren’t doing well in search results, one solution is to incorporate more relevant and important keywords into the text in an effort to boost page views.
7. Low Traffic Content
Investigate the Google Analytics rankings of your most read posts to find out if they have experienced a decline in organic traffic. Changes to the search engine’s algorithm, broken links, problems during the migration or redesign, subpar content, and faulty tracking code are all possible causes.
Where to Find the Best Opportunities to Revise Your Old Blog Posts
Now that you know which post you want to enhance, you can begin preparing for the revision.
In this step, you’ll choose your focus keywords and determine the supplementary material for the post.
Choosing Your Keyword Target
In the first place, you need to decide on a primary keyword that will be the focus of your revised post.
Verify the post’s current keyword rankings in Google Search Console, or your preferred keyword tracking tool. If the post is already doing well in search results for a keyword that has a fair amount of monthly searches, it’s best to focus on that term exclusively.
Also, if you find that the post ranks well for keywords that aren’t being used in the content, you might want to think about using those keywords as secondary keyword targets by using them in subheadings and the body text.
But you might need to look into other keyword options if your post doesn’t rank well for any keyword that gets a lot of searches or if it ranks for a keyword that has nothing to do with it.
Checking the related searches section at the bottom of the search engine results pages is a good way to discover new keywords related to your topic.
Related Google Searches
If you’re stuck for keywords, Google’s autocomplete is there to help. As you begin typing into Google’s search bar, the service will suggest alternative keywords.
You can also find new ideas and search volumes by using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or AnswerThePublic.
Make sure the keyword you choose has a search intent that is relevant to your post. You can see if there is a significant gap between your strategy and the rest of the pack by looking at the top results for that keyword.
Choose a primary keyword and start monitoring how well the post does in relation to it immediately. After the update has been released, you can evaluate its success using these metrics.
Choosing Which Details To Include
It’s time to think about how to improve the post by adding new information.
A simple approach is to analyze the content that is currently ranking well for your target keyword and then model your own writing after it.
In other words, analyze what the winning posts have in common and use that information to inform what you should emphasize in your own. The goal here is to produce superior content to that of your rivals by including more material than they do.
Look For Information You Have Not Discussed
Check out the other posts on page one for your target keyword to see if there’s anything you can learn. In this section, you need to search for and add missing information to your post.
Checking the replies to your own and your rivals’ posts can also help you spot opportunities for new content. When users ask pertinent questions or make valid points, you get a chance to see things from a fresh perspective.
Discussions on message boards and other online forums follow the same pattern. Examine social media platforms like Quora, Twitter, and Facebook for relevant tidbits.
Revamp Your Posts Style
Ask yourself why a competitor’s post is so interesting if you come across one that seems to stand out from the crowd. Could it be the author’s tone? Is it the tone? Use of several forms of media? Take notes on whatever it is and consider how you can work it into your own writing.
Following the New Release
As soon as you’ve finished making the necessary changes to your post, hit publish and start spreading the word!
You can wait for Google to automatically index the new content, or you can submit a fresh index request through Google Search Console.
You should promote the revised posts in the same ways you would a brand-new one: by emailing your list, posting links to them on your social media pages, contacting any bloggers or influencers you may have mentioned, and, if you can afford it, paying to boost their visibility.
Finally, keep a close eye on the post’s statistics for the first couple of weeks. This entails not only monitoring the typical performance metrics in your analytics, but also the comments section for helpful criticism.
