Let’s face it: You spend a ton of time working on your blog content, perhaps now for several years or decades. Whether you’re a long-time blogger or haven’t touched your blog in a while, you’ll know how it feels. You pour your heart and soul into each piece, upload it, get ranked by Google, and then move onto the next piece.
Meanwhile, your older blog posts are just sitting there, hoping to be noticed by Google’s ever-changing algorithm. The truth is, poor old blog posts seem to be so easily forgotten about.
However, is this really the best way to manage content? What if there was a way to update your old blog posts, get them reranked, boost their SEO, bring in new results, and overall remain relevant for your business? I’m here to tell you there is. Multiple ways actually, and these are what we’re going to be exploring today.
1. Creating and Sharing New Images
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There’s no denying that visual content is big these days, and grabbing your audience’s attention is all about having images and videos that pull people in. With this in mind, go through your old content. If you see that some images are irrelevant to your blog, then scrap them, and upload new images.
There are various ways to gather images for your blog:
- There are plenty of free photo websites out there, such as Pexels and Unsplash, that provide free, high-quality content you can use for any purpose.
- If you want the best-quality photos (ones that look and feel premium), consider going with paid sites like Shutterstock to gather images.
- You may even want to create new images, such as infographics or graphs that make your content even more interactive and, most importantly, shareable, whether that’s your readers sharing your content or you posting the visuals to your social media pages.
Research shows that using larger images in your web pages will reduce bounce rates by an average of 27%, and increase conversion rates by 36%, so it’s clearly well worth checking out this approach.
2. Focus on New Keywords
Believe it or not, Google’s algorithm is always changing, now paying more attention to the keywords that websites implement, so that they’re ranked as the search engine sees fit. Google will do the same with blogs.
This is, perhaps, the easiest, yet one of the most effective, changes you can make to your old articles and blog posts is simply going through and updating the focus keywords of each piece. When you consider how old some of your posts may be and how new technologies, such as voice searching, have surfaced and become more popular, it only makes sense you’ll update your posts to keep up with the trends.
The best way to do this is to choose which posts you’re going to update. Just keep in mind: You don’t need to update all of your post. Most of your work, in this instance, is to do some keyword research and editing to refresh the content and make it relevant to the markets and audiences you’re trying to reach.
3. Working on Your Meta Descriptions
When you’re searching for content online, the meta descriptions and tags will be one of the main reasons while you’ll rank at the top of Google (especially in the little Q&A box features they now have), and will determine whether or not your audience wants to click on your website. However, it takes some exploring through the inner working of your blog to learn about meta descriptions. But the good news is, you don’t need to be a coding wiz to configure your meta descriptions.
Now, here’s something to think about: How many of your blog posts’ meta descriptions do you think are actually counterproductive and stop people from clicking on you? Some key points to remember here are making sure you include keywords in your meta descriptions and optimize the text to fit the character limit on both desktop and mobile devices.
Ultimately, you’ll be figuring out how to make your blog more optimized for any device that your audiences are reading from. (Yes, mobile-friendliness is just as important!)
4. Update the Data
As we mentioned above, you don’t need to update all of your blog posts just for the sake of it, but rather just being selective with the content you want to refresh and choosing how you want to refresh it. For example, if you have blog posts that contain dated information, then it’s worth going through and making this data relevant again.
Let’s say, for example, you have several posts that use studies and statistics that date back to 2007. Have there been new studies, perhaps even more interesting studies that back up your claim, or in fact, prove the opposite. Keeping your blog content relevant is such an important part of becoming an authoritative website in your niche and industry. The last thing you want is to let irrelevant and or incorrect
Along the same lines, you can also add new data to make your content more appealing, more relevant, and overall enhancing the quality of the content on your website. Once the search engines have reranked your content, you may find you have a very high-performance post.
Conclusion
So, you see, old blog posts don’t have to stay “old” forever. You can actually breathe new life into them by following the 4 tips that we’ve discussed today in this article:
- Create and share new visuals.
- Prioritize relevant keywords to stay on top.
- Tinker with the meta description. AND,
- Update, update, update.
Remember: You’re maintaining an established presence online. Therefore, as you work to make your blog relevant, not only for your current readers, but also for future ones.
So, keep these useful tips in mind, and happy blogging!
Lauren Groff is a blog writer at Essay Services and Academized. Lauren loves nothing more than helping businesses create content that resonates with their audiences and overall makes the internet a more exciting and interesting place. Also, she is a contributor at State Of Writing.
