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If you own a blog, you need to create unique and new content related to your niche if you want to attract more traffic. However, blog owners have one great challenge—getting involved in this process so much, to the extent that they miss the chance of attracting more traffic vial their old blog posts. Blog owners should understand one thing—your blog should adapt to all the current trends and time, and continue remaining relevant throughout its entire life cycle. As a content marketer and human, you should always be updated for others to have an interest in you, and your blog content.

But, with proper planning, the process of updating your old blog shouldn’t be a daunting task. In fact, this process shouldn’t be so different from the process of upgrading your wardrobe. What you need to do is to check the current trends, what other people are interested in for that season, then put on them depending on the comfort of the seasons. The secret here is—doing this continuously, and making it part of your content calendar. When you do this, you will be able to give your audience not only the best but also the recent content on your blogs.

The following are 2 reasons why you need to update your old blogs

To avoid losing your existing traffic

Anyone can come across one of your old blog posts that have a better ranking in Google search, or one that has been referred to from another blog. One thing that you should understand is that not every Google search results should have fresh and relevant content for long-tail keywords for a particular niche. There is a possibility that your blog ranks on Google’s first page, but it might not take for another blog to replace it, pushing it to the second page, and stealing your online traffic. This is a risk you cannot afford as a blog owner—losing your online traffic.

Boosting the visibility and traffic for your old blogs

If you have an old blog, not everyone has had the chance to see your old content, since it’s usually hidden by the new content that you keep on posting. However, updating your old blogs can lengthen their life, particularly when you share them your most recent traffic to your blog.

So, which old blogs should you upgrade?

You need to be smart when doing this, as you don’t want to apply your strategies to all your posts, and also to avoid doing a selective work. Doing that will put you at the risk of not maximizing your results. In any case, upgrading the old content in your blogs come second after your new blog posts in terms of priority.

To start, you need to make sure that you have an inventory for all your blog posts. Check to see which content ranked best, and is related to your current line of business. One thing you should note about blogs is that they are not the same, which means some will have a higher value than others, and this happens because of the following reasons:

  • Readability
  • Shareability in different social media platforms
  • Depth of content
  • Better conversion rates
  • Has better engagement rates, causing readers to stay more on the page
  • At times, you won’t have an idea why the blog attracts more traffic to your site

When selecting the posts that you should update, you need to follow these steps:

Find out the blog posts with the best performance

For this, you will need Google Analytics. Use it to narrow down the blog posts that have the following interesting metrics:

  • Inbound links – you should give more value to inbound links, as they give you a clear idea of a post’s search authority. You need to search for blog posts that have the highest number of inbound links.
  • Website traffic – when looking at your blog analytics, set a time frame for a certain period of time. Doing that allows you to know which old posts that are still attracting a considerable amount of traffic.
  • Social shares – online users will always share your posts for a reason, which is the relevance of the post. The total number of social shares should show you how the post is performing. What you don’t know is that social shares play an essential role when it comes to social ranking. You can use different platforms like Buzzsumo to know the number of times your post was shared across different social media platforms.
  • Keywords – when upgrading and republishing your old blog posts, use that opportunity to improve your keywords. So, the question you need to ask yourself is whether you have plans to inserts extra keywords with a higher search volume. See if the content is already ranking for organic keywords that you didn’t target in the beginning. Then use a keyword research tool to search for the keywords with better ranking opportunities. If you have posts that are already ranking for such keywords, use that opportunity to upgrade them for better rankings.

Update the blog post with the latest content

Using a metric-drive approach is very helpful, but you shouldn’t ignore your instincts when observing your industry and audience. Your metric-driven approach should be accompanied by a topic bases research—and by this, we mean by the topics related to your industry.

Here, you will realize that it’s better to update and republish your original content than writing new blog posts from scratch. Doing this allows you to keep the URL of your original post intact. There is no need to write two identical blog posts while you have the chance to improve your existing blog post. One thing that you need to note is that Google’s real-time algorithms don’t like people messing up things when it comes to content publishing.

Once you are through with the above steps, now you need to start revamping the old content that you’ve selected. Before you start, you should note that many things have changed, and you can use your old content, and expect it to give you good results. Here are a few things in your old blog post that you can change when refurbishing your blog posts.

Graphics

Improving the graphics of your old blog post can significantly boost its chances to rank better, as it’s an indication that you have fresh content in your post. You can use tools like Photoshop, Pic Monkey, and Canva, among others, to improve the graphics of your post. Research has revealed that blog posts with many images have a higher engagement rate, and also rank better in Google.

There is a possibility that the image density and dimensions of your old blog posts are not at par with your latest blog posts. So, you need to use your latest templates to update the blogs with rich but lightweight images for better user experience.

Writing style

The style you used to write the blog several years ago might not be effective when re-posting it. This means you might have to change the writing tone to suit your current audience. For instance, when starting out, you might have used a simple, plain, and self-explanatory tone to your blog. However, as you grew, you now change to a user engaged and narrative tone—which means you might have to change your tone to that style.

Word count

By now, you must have learned lots of new things ever since you published that blog post. So, you need to use that knowledge to add extra information to your audience. Increasing the word count for your old posts means they will become longer, which will also make them Google’s favorite.

Maybe you discussed a tool or plugin that’s no longer active. So, you need to be careful when adding the information to make sure that it’s meaningful and up-to-date so that you can generate the right traffic with the post. Experts recommend that you add “heavy sections” of the content so that you can make the post more informative.

Social media inputs

Sharing your old content across different social media platforms might not have been the best option at that moment. Today, social media has significantly changed—and you should capitalize on that. When refurbishing your content, make sure that you give your audience the power to share the content.

You can also opt to add famous tweets instead of the images in your post. This assists your target audience to relate better with your content, and also give them additional information about that topic.

404 Errors

Your old post might have 404 errors, also known as 404 redundant links that point your visitors to other sites that don’t exist anymore. Sites with such links can be severely penalized by Google, and you need to use a broken link checker tool to check if your blog has 404 redundant links. Replacing such links in your site is important, as the last thing you’d want is to disappoint your visitors by sharing links that don’t work.

Internal links

By now, we assume that you have written lots of other blogs after posting the blog that you want to modify now. There is a possibility that you used a specific keyword for that blog, with the aim of attracting more visitors. However, you will not need to add relevant internal links to the blog so that you can give your visitors content that’s more valuable. Make sure that you add as many internal links as possible. The last thing that you’d want as the blog owner is for your visitors to miss the information that you post on your blog or website, and internal linking will assist them not to miss such information.

You can also search for other blogs on your site, and then link them to the old blog post that you want to update — adding fresh backlinks on your old post signals Google that you have fresh and relevant content. Also, it’s important to note that internal back-linking is far much better compared to building links to your home page.

Experts say that internal linking, so long as it’s relevant, is much more informative and beneficial to your reader. Google is aware of that, which means it will assist your blogs to rank better.

Improving old guest posts to get relevant backlinks

By this time, there’s a chance that you have earned the opportunity to publish your content on other websites or blogs as a contributor or a guest author. Also, you may be possessing the right to republish your own blog posts on those sites. Use this opportunity to add relevant backlinks to your own blogs so that you can attract more traffic from the readers of the guest blogs. Moreover, Google will assist you in ranking your blog since it has external links from other sites outside your blog or website, directing readers to your revamped blog post.

Also, ensure that you monitor the backlink sources of your competitors. You might notice that they have gained several links from a particular blog that’s authoritative, and has better rankings in Google. What you need to do is to find out how your competitors are doing that, and then make sure that you do it better than them. This should be a continuous activity, where you publish relevant and valuable content for the guest blog’s audience, and make sure that you mention the valuable blogs that you’ve written in the past, and then get a backlink to these blogs.

Add a FAQ section to your blog

This is one of the best ways that you can do to refurbish your blog. But first, you need to listen to the queries that your target audience as in multiple social media platforms and forums in regards to the blog you want to refurbish. Then, make sure that you answer these questions as much as you can at the end of the blog.

When you do that, you will have added user-generated content to the blog, which is a natural way to add the keywords that you’ve already covered in the post.