How Updating Your Blog Content Can Boost Your SEO Ranking

If you’re familiar with these facts, you’re probably already investing heavily in on-page, off-page and technical SEO. And while this is great for improving your search ranking, there’s something you may be missing that can improve it even more: re-optimizing old content. If you’re not updating your blog content regularly, then you’re missing an opportunity to enhance your rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

Let’s take a closer look at why re-optimizing is essential for your blog SEO strategy — and how to update website content effectively.

Why Optimizing Blog Content Matters for Your Search Rankings

Every page on your website presents an opportunity for optimization. And while product and service pages can help visitors understand your offer, they don’t always help with conversions. 

What if visitors aren’t ready to make a purchase? This is where blog content excels. 

When your top-of-the-funnel audience is searching Google, they’re looking for information about their pains (and ways to resolve them). If you’re writing on these topics on your blog — and properly optimizing them — you can potentially grow your online presence and attract high-level leads.

Factors That Affect Your SERP Performance

But the key is getting them to find your blog content organically, which will require getting to the first page of Google. Now, several SEO ranking factors play a significant role in your position in the SERPs. This includes:

• Relevance (i.e., how closely connected your content is to search intent — this is the most important factor)
• Page speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Technical SEO
• Optimized content
• Links (both internal and external)
• Social signals
• User experience

Your Blog Is an SEO Goldmine

Blog content makes it easy to target several SEO best practices at once. You can do this by:

• Adding long-tail keywords (with highly specified search intent) to titles and in content (content optimization)
• Including related keywords in titles and in content (content optimization)
• Writing on topics that relate to your audience (user experience)
• Going in-depth on a topic and including external links to reputable sources (user experience and link building)
• Making your content easy to share by adding social share buttons (social signals)

As you can see, it’s about more than keywords — you need content that’s useful, informative, valuable, credible, high quality and engaging. 

How Updating Your Blog Will Boost Your SEO Even Further

But once you publish your blog content, this isn’t the end of the optimization cycle. Based on a HubSpot case study, content re-optimization can improve traffic to old posts by 106%. Updating your blog content can help your search ranking in several ways:

Freshen Your Content

Google likes to keep its search results fresh. This is why you’ll see recent posts at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). The only time you’ll find content that is several years old is if it’s consistently updated with fresh information, links, etc.

Improve Click-Through Rates

Google isn’t the only one that likes fresh content. People also like to click on links with recent dates. This tells them they’re getting the most up-to-date information on a topic.

Enhance Your Link Power

When you update your blog posts, you’ll want to focus on removing broken and outdated links and replacing them with relevant, up-to-date links. This is also a good time to find new and better resources to add to the content.

Make Your Content More In-Depth

Updating blog content is an opportunity to conduct new research and find new information. If you find new data, you can use this to enhance your post and make it longer (and more valuable). Remember, if you can write a post that’s more in-depth than a competitors’, then it’s more likely to outrank theirs.

Re-Optimize With Better Keywords

Keywords can also become outdated, especially if the intent of the searcher changes. Make sure the keyword and phrases you’re using are still relevant to your topic and offer. You should also look for new keywords that didn’t have traffic before but do now. Be sure to also re-optimize your metadata with any new keywords and phrases you find.

Promote and Share Content Again

After updating your blog post, you’ll want to promote it again to your audience. This way, you’ll get more clicks and eyes on the page (and hopefully, more dwell time on your blog). It’s an opportunity to drive more traffic to posts that had success in the past.

How to Tell Which Content to Update and Re-Optimize

So, how do you decide which content needs refreshing so you can work smarter (not harder)? There’s no need to go into a frenzy updating every blog post on your website. Instead, you’ll want to focus on content that meets certain criteria:

• It doesn’t rank in the top five positions for your target keywords
• Current keywords have low search volume.
• It doesn’t get much (if any) traffic or traffic has decreased significantly over time.
• It has outdated/broken links.
• There’s new information that refutes (or further proves) what you’ve written.

To make this process easier, you can use Google Search Console to identify pages that aren’t generating sufficient traffic. Once there, you want to look for:

• Posts in positions 8-20 with a high click-through rate (CTR). These receive clicks but not many go past #7 in the SERPs. Improving its rank will help generate even more clicks because many pages that rank lower than No.7 will not show up on the first page of SERPs.
• Posts in positions 8-20 with high impressions. Google already finds these links relevant for high-volume searches. But it’s a bit buried, which hurts your CTR. 
• Posts with high impressions and low CTR. These links show up in the SERPs but aren’t being clicked (maybe it’s the title, an old date, poor meta description or something else). 

How to Update Your Blog Posts to Improve SEO (and Longevity)

You put a lot of work into building your blog into a resource. So you want to do what you can to make each post maintain relevancy (hopefully, forever). 

Thankfully, there’s a science behind content longevity, which means you can improve the odds of making that happen. Here’s a look at some of the ways you can turn your blog posts into long-term traffic generators:

Repurpose Your Content

There are various other forms of content into which you can repurpose each blog post. For example, if you have a blog post with lots of great stats, then you can turn it into an infographic. Or you can develop a SlideShare to share on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Check for Mobile-Friendliness

If you’re searching the web on a mobile device (like the majority of users today), you’ll find that Google prioritizes links to web pages that are mobile-optimized. This means your website should be accessible on both smartphone and tablet screen sizes. It’s also ideal to ensure your page load speeds are quick to avoid losing visitors at the gate. High bounce rates will only hurt your SEO rank.

Create a Pillar Page

Is the topic of your blog post deep? Then dive deeper by turning it into a pillar page that links out to cluster posts. Pillars are long-form posts that cover all aspects of a topic. The clusters dive deeper into each aspect discussed in the pillar content. This helps with SEO because it provides high value and encourages visitors to stay longer to read through the pillar and its cluster pages. As a bonus, your pillar page will be recognized as a resource, which can encourage others to link back to it (an SEO booster).