Whether it’s your life or business, things need to be updated every once in a while: your media collection, your wardrobe, your mailing address, and your lifestyle as a whole. Things get irrelevant, stale, and outdated, and it’s just the way of every growing world. The same rules apply to every aspect of your business, and your marketing strategy is not an exception! Content that was fresh, accurate and exceptional becomes outdated and irrelevant and even obsolete in the worst cases.

Just like it is easy to change your media collection, update your wardrobe, get a brand new haircut, you can update your content strategy pretty easily too.  And, in doing so, you can help your content extend its life. This is very important, particularly for the high-performing and popular content which can bring you great results. Secondly, it can save you resources and time from creating content from scratch. 

So be ready to get your hands dirty and reexplore your blogs. Relax, sit back, and learn all about the strategy that can help you execute the process of updating your outdated blog content and republishing it with a fresh touch. Trust me, and your blog readers will thank you. 

But why should you bother updating the old content in the first place?

Why updating old content is critical

If you have been writing blogs over the past years, I bet you must have some irrelevant, old information lurking behind the shadows of your blog. But this old content is buried, and no one is really going to see it anymore, right? Wrong! 

Let’s first explain why you should care about updating your old blog content!

Extend the life of your content 

If you own a blog for your Irvine SEO company, you probably know it’s posting blogs and creating written content is significant in regards to search engine optimization in the long run. A certain percentage of traffic that you receive today is due to the blogs that you have published earlier. A study shows that 69% of the blog traffic for businesses received in July was due to the content that was published earlier. Trust me, that’s a lot of traffic – meaning if the blog is receiving traffic due to the blog posts that you wrote in the past, then your content still ranks well. One of the significant advantages is your content receives results in terms of traffic and leads. But what if the information on these old blog posts that are still generating traffic and leads is outdated and in certain situations wrong? 

By resurfacing and updating your old blog posts and high performing evergreen posts, you can extend the life of your blog content so that it can continue to give you traffic and leads. 

It can also help you save a lot of time and resources. Secondly, it is far easier for you to update content than writing a new blog from scratch. Although this sounds appealing, you do not need to update every post that you have published in the past. You still need to publish new, unique, and fresh content! Identify the blog posts that have been performing well in the past and update them while maintaining a consistent publishing frequency. 

How to decide which of your Irvine SEO company’s posts to update

Let the statistics be your guide when choosing which posts to update. Focus on some high performing blogs which are backed by good looking metrics such as traffic, inbound links, social shares, and keywords. 

Inbound links – According to the experts, an inbound link is the most indicative of search authority. Find out which of your blogs have a lot of inbound links. 

Traffic– Use any advanced tool to find out which of your old posts are still generating a lot of traffic.

Social shares – the number of social shares has a lot to do with your blog performance. Check out some free tools that can tell you how many shares a specific blog post has received in the past. 

Keywords – Use your content updating process as an opportunity to incorporate your new keywords list. Look for a new set of keywords that you want to rank better in search engines. 

Consider trending topics and content relevancy 

Apart from the metrics-driven approach, pay attention to the trending topics and content relevancy. Based on your overall marketing strategy and goals, updating your content for these two parameters can trump a metrics-driven approach. For example, if you have written a blog post about Instagram’s new feature six months back, it has probably already become outdated. You have to update it because Instagram creates new features almost every week. Even if your metrics-driven approach had not identified the worth of updating a post such as this one, you should do it, keeping with the relevancy and trending of a topic. 

Are you currently incorporating a content updating and repurposing strategy into your blog? Share your experience regarding your Irvine SEO company’s content updating strategy.