Does your business website feature a blog? When was the last time you updated it?
In the United States alone, there are over 37 million active bloggers, defined as content creators who have updated or added new posts to their blogs in the past 12 months. If that seems like a lot of content out there, you’re right – but it continues to grow because of its value to businesses to attract organic search traffic. Fully 92% of business owners say they blog because it’s a cornerstone of their digital marketing program.
Many companies begin a blog only to find themselves needing help to maintain or add to it over time. Competing priorities often divert time and resources away from the blog – and that’s a shame. The longer a blog remains dormant and untouched, the potentially lower its content sinks in the search engine ranks since Google and many other search engines place value on frequent updates. Aging, untouched content can be viewed by search engine algorithms as less relevant over time, making it harder to gain search engine rank and traffic.
Why Update Your Blog?
Blogs serve many purposes as part of a digital marketing plan.
- Search engine traffic: Blogs can attract organic search engine traffic if each post or article is optimized properly. The more people who find your website, the more opportunities you have to make a sale or generate leads.
- Useful information: A good business blog is more than generic articles. It helps establish expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, the so-called “E-A-T” formula that boosts the popularity of blogs in search engine results. The more your blog reflects your voice, authority, and perspective, the better – Google’s last few updates have rewarded content that offers original information in a compelling manner.
- Build brand: Blogs can also be used to establish a brand voice and tone in the marketplace. If the blog is written from a unique perspective or has a distinctive tone that reflects the parent company’s brand, it can serve as another essential place online to reinforce a company’s brand perspective.
- News and share-worthy content: Some blogs provide industry news. While the posts may not be evergreen, they still offer plenty of marketing opportunities because they may be shared and commented on.
But what if you do not update your blog? What if your last post was made weeks, months, or even years ago?
Old, stale blog content works against your website:
- It makes a site outdated
- It looks like you don’t care about details
- It may be ignored or even delisted by Google
- You lose opportunities for site traffic, leads, and sales
Updating Old Blog Posts – Breathing New Life Into Old Content
Although it is a good idea to add new blog posts if you haven’t done so in a while, updating older posts can also provide Google with information that your blog is active and viable.
What does it mean to update old blog posts? Here are some aspects of updating older posts:
- Revising or refreshing keyword phrases based on new data
- Updating titles to make them more appealing
- Adding new images
- Updating meta tags and descriptions
- Updating links and checking for broken links
- Updating information
- Revising the text to make it better reflect search intent
And this is only a partial list of what goes into refreshing older blog content. Much preparatory work must be done to identify where blog posts currently stand in Google’s rankings, what competitors are doing right (or wrong) to rank better or worse than your site, and so much more.
Benefits of Updating Older Blog Posts
As you can see from the previous list, updating older blog posts can be time-consuming. Yet it can more than pay for itself.
By updating older blog posts, you can:
- Improve search rank
- Increase site visitors, leads, and sales
- Provide fresh articles for social media sharing
- Reuse them for new content, such as turning a blog post into a PDF
No Time? We Do Content Updates
So don’t discount your older blog posts or a blog that’s been idle for some time. You can still get a lot of traction from it in the form of search traffic if you perform an update. But how to update it, and to what level of detail, can be challenging to navigate for the average business owner.
That’s why it is vital to work with the content and SEO experts at Dashboard Interactive Marketing. We can help you assess the current state of your blog and suggest update priorities to help you get the most bang for your marketing buck. Call us at 763-242-2454 for more information.