5 Benefits of Updating Old Blog Posts for SEO

Blogging is an amazing method of content marketing. A successful blog can do a lot for a brand. It establishes them as an authority in their field, promotes positive emotions in the readers, and drastically improves exposure to the public.

For these reasons, blogging is really good. If you look closely, you can see that all of these things are related to SEO in one way or another. Better SEO promotes higher ranking which improves exposure. And only authoritative, helpful content is promoted in the first place.

Outdated content is none of these things, and that can have several consequences. In, this article though, we are going to discuss some advantages of updating old, outdated blog posts, all of which are related to SEO.

1. Improvements in User Engagement

On-page SEO includes everything that can be done on your web pages to improve their SEO. This includes technical aspects such as tags, headers, metadata, etc. This also includes your page contents such as page menus, CTAs, and actual blog posts.

Since the topic today is blog posts and engagement, we will only discuss the blog post content and its benefits.

Some ways in which you can update old blog content to improve On-page SEO and engagement are to:

• Include other relevant pages of your site
• Use new keywords that are more popular and attract more traffic
• Paraphrase your content to capture new ways of speaking/writing

User engagement is very dependent on how easy it is to read something and whether the content is interesting or not. When it comes to readability, you can paraphrase your old content to change the hard words and phrases with easier alternatives.

You can paraphrase either yourself or, if you are not am expert in paraphrasing than a paraphraser can do the job for you. Online paraphrasers are very good at doing paraphrasing jobs because of its AI technology, so you can reap the benefits of updating old content with the least amount of effort.

2. Improve Alignment with E.E.A.T

The biggest search engine on the market right now is undoubtedly Google. So, most people who are optimizing for SEO are actually keeping Google’s guidelines in perspective.

One of the most important things that Google focuses on when ranking a page is its E.A.T.

E.A.T stand for the following:

• Expertise
• Authority
• Trustworthiness

(There’s another ‘E’, but we’ll look at that one in a minute.)

These are the qualities of some content that Google takes into account before ranking it. When you update your blog post, you can reevaluate whether your content shows off the expertise of your brand, whether the content is authoritative, and if it is trustworthy or not.

Recently Google has added another E to this which stands for “Experience”, i.e., the writer needs to show that they have personally experienced what they are writing about.

When updating old blog posts, you should focus on improving these things. A few ways you can do that are:

• Adding new content
• Showing that you have used the tools/services and speaking from experience using images and details
• Using trustworthy information backed by good sources

If you do all of that and align your content with E.A.T values, you will be able to successfully improve the SERP ranking of your old (now updated) blog post. (If you want to learn more about E.A.T, you can check out this post.)

3. Improve the “Freshness” of Your Content

If you check out Google SERPs for informative content, you will notice a trend; many of the top results are not more than a few months old. It is quite rare for old content to consistently rank high. The only exception is evergreen content which is unlikely to change quickly hence its rank largely remains the same.

This is actually a really good benefit of updating old blog posts. By adding in new content and changing the formatting to cater to a new audience, you can make your old content “Fresh.” This freshness will bump the content up the ladder to a higher rank.

Of course, “freshness” alone is not good enough to improve SEO. It needs to be backed with other techniques as well.

Some of these techniques we have already discussed, and some are still left. By combining “Freshness” with these techniques, you will be able to dramatically improve the SEO of your Content.

4. Make Your Content Unique Again

One thing that old content does not have is uniqueness. Throughout its lifetime, the content may become redundant as other pieces similar to it are published. Thus, it loses its value and is unable to rank very high.

One method of improving your ranking in the SERPs is to update your old content and focus on improving its uniqueness. There are several ways of doing this:

• Literally change the words and sentences to be different
• Add new information that sets the content apart
• Dramatically change the formatting of the content to make it look different

You should probably do all of them at once as that has the highest chance of making your content unique. Changing the formatting and adding information is probably the easier part of this venture. It’s the paraphrasing that is difficult. However, as we have already mentioned before, you can simply rephrase online the parts that are not unique.

Online rephrasing is good enough to completely alter the given text without ruining its meaning and context. So, with all three of these techniques combined, you can efficiently improve the uniqueness of your content.

5. Add New Value to Your Content

Value-added content has always been a good contender for the top rankings in the SERPs. We are mentioning this because of how everyone defines value differently. It is because every person is different.

Sometimes old blog posts do not perform well because they are not providing the right value to their audience. Updating such posts can be really helpful. Updating the information can help you target the right audience and provide them with the value they desire.

To do that you need to do some research and incorporate the keywords that are currently in demand. You should especially target long-tail keywords that provide your insight into search intent, i.e., what or why they are searching for something.

Another thing you can do is conduct surveys and collect information about the people who visit your online platforms. Take note of what pages they visit and which pages they ignore. Read their comments. The comments along with the most visited pages can provide you with some great information about what provides the most value to the customers.

So, take updating old content as a new opportunity for success, and a chance to shine in the SERPs.

Conclusion

Updating old content is a useful effort as it helps your website stay on top of the SERPs. Brands create tons of content every day, but they forget how much they have made. But search engines do not, and they count them when deciding on a SERP ranking.

Pages with old content can harm your site, so you should always be on the lookout for outdated content. We have discussed the advantages of updating old blog posts, so take this seriously and you will succeed in improving the SEO of your content.