Why You Need to Review & Update Old Blog Posts

Blogging is one of the top strategies I recommend for improving SEO and growing an interested audience for your website, and thus, your business.

(I’m kind of a broken record about the importance of blogging in your business! 🕺)

The reason blogging is so effective is that each new blog post is full of helpful content and relevant keywords that help people find you in the big wide world of the interwebs. And, the fact that they’re published regularly helps search engines know that your site is kept current, which in turn helps you rank better in their algorithms.

For the most part, you can write a quality blog post, publish it (and promote it for bonus points!), and it gets to work for you behind the scenes, quietly attracting new visitors to your website, without further action needed from you.

But there is one more thing I actually recommend you do: every now and then, you should also review and update your blog posts.

Why?

Hint: SEO

How to update old blog posts to improve SEO

There are a few reasons you should periodically review and update old blog posts, and they all relate back to SEO:

1. Update & improve your content

It’s a good idea to review older content to be sure it’s still accurate, and update any outdated information as needed.

It’s also an opportunity to add to and enhance older posts, if there is newer information that became available on the topic, or you learned something new in relation to it, or you’re able to expand upon the existing content in any way.

Remember, longer posts tend to perform better in search engine rankings!

So, this is a great way to add to your word count as well. I suggest maintaining at least 1,000 words per post—though if you’re serious about SEO, 1,500-2,500 is even better.

2. Add more keyword-rich headings

In reviewing existing content, as well as adding new content to older posts, take advantage of any additional places you could insert a keyword-rich heading (styled with your Heading 1, 2 or 3 styles in your Squarespace text editor—and you get a fourth heading style if you’re on Squarespace 7.1).

These headings not only help readers scan and understand your content, but they help search engines do that too!

Keep this in mind and add keyword-rich headings where applicable in your older blog posts:

differentiate sections of content
add a title to lists
stylize more detailed lists (for example, we’re doing that here, as each numbered item is styled as a heading)

3. Add more internal links

As you’re reviewing older content, look for any additional internal linking opportunities—places you can link to your other relevant blog posts, freebies or product/service offerings.

Often, new blog posts have been published that could be linked to from older blog posts. Or, a new resource or business offering has been launched that could be linked to or promoted in an older blog post.

Reviewing older content and taking advantage of these new internal linking opportunities helps to both boost SEO, as well as connect your website visitors with more relevant content that may be of interest to them (aka, keeps them on your site longer, which also helps SEO).

4. Review & clarify calls-to-action

Every page on your website should have a goal—a specific action you’d like visitors to take.

As you look through old blog posts, ensure that each one has a clear and specific call-to-action—whether that’s a freebie opt-in gift, another webpage that’s part of your sales funnel, or a direct link to a product or service sales page.

Again, connecting visitors with additional content on your website after they’re done with a given page (or blog post) helps keep them around longer and, thus, helps boost your SEO.

5. Fix any broken links

Hopefully you’re already using a broken link checker every month or so to be sure you’re catching any broken links popping up on your site.

Broken links are often not your fault, and they’re often external links—wherever you’re linking to changed the URL, or the page was taken down.

It’s important to stay aware of and fix these as they come up, because broken links can hurt SEO, as they tell search engines your page is not kept up-to-date.

6. Newer post date improves search engine “relevancy”

Part of what search engines are assessing when they rank content is, of course, how relevant a given page is to the search query someone has made.

Relevancy algorithms are massively complicated, but they include the type of content that’s on the page (the items we’ve covered above here), as well as how current that content is.

Now, blog post SEO does take time to grow. So a brand new blog post is generally not better-ranking than an older one. But, there’s a limit to that. A blog post written ten years ago is generally going to have decreased in ranking because it’s deemed to be “old news.”

This doesn’t mean that your old blog post content should wither and die if it’s still relevant and helpful to present-day search queries. So, we just need to help search engines understand that it is still relevant by refreshing the post date to show that all is alive and well on that page.

As you update content, you can update the publication date of blog posts that are older than two years, to help show search engines they’re “fresh.”

7. Update your blog post title (if needed)

Your blog posts should be named with keyword-rich, SEO-friendly titles. In other words, they should accurately describe what’s inside the content of your post, what problem is being solved for your readers, and what queries it helps answer, etc.

You can review the SEO-friendliness of your blog post titles using CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer tool, and update them as needed.

8. Update your blog post URL (if needed)

When updating older blog posts, your URL can stay the same if you’re following our recommended structure: website.com/blog/post-title

However, if your blog post URLs include the publication date (such as website.com/blog/2020-01-01/blog-post-title), you may want to update the post URL to the recommended “evergreen” structure above and set up a URL redirect to send any links still using the old URL to the new one.

And, if you changed your blog post title in #7 above, you can update the URL here as well.

How often do you need to update blog posts?

How often you should review and update your blog content depends on how much new content you’re adding to your site, as well as how much effort you’d like to put into your website SEO.

In general, I recommend reviewing blog posts annually, though twice a year would be great if possible. And, if SEO is a huge focus for you, and you’re adding lots of new content that might provide new links for past posts, every quarter is even better.

Which posts should I prioritize?

If you have a gazillion blog posts on your site and need somewhere to start, there are two strategies (take your pick!):

Work through your best-performing posts first. These are the posts that likely have the best potential to achieve high search ranking, as they’re already catching the most attention from search engines and visitors to your site.
Work through your worst-performing posts first. These are the posts that likely have the most room for improvement, as they’re not doing as well as other content on your site.

Your blog post performance can be found in your Squarespace Analytics dashboard. (And here’s how to understand your website analytics if you’re new to it!).

Reindex your blog posts with Google

When you’re all done updating your blog posts, you’ll want to resubmit those pages in your Google Search Console. This requests that Google re-crawl them, so they can see all those nice new changes you made, and update how your post will rank in their algorithm.

For instructions on submitting pages for re-indexing, follow Squarespace’s guide on indexing your site with Google.