Why You Need to Update Your Old Blog Posts

You've been populating your blog with content for years, but after a while you might notice your traffic isn't growing the way you want it to. You always share your posts on MySpace and Friendster, but your Dawson's Creek recaps aren't getting the same amount of love as they used to. So what gives, dawg? No, it isn't the Y2K bug—it is your old and outdated content dragging you down.

If you noticed something off with the last paragraph, then you may also realize how important it is to make sure your blog content is fresh and relevant. Older blog posts often lose relevance over time and lose traffic. Just like you've updated your slang and television show preferences over time, you need to update your past blog posts, too. That's because having too many poorly performing blog posts on your site can create a drag on your overall site authority.

Eventually, even the best blog posts might become stale and lose traffic over time. That's why it is important to periodically audit your blog content to make sure that all of your posts are quality posts. When reviewing your content you'll want to take one of the following actions for each post:

• Do nothing and leave it as is
• Rewrite or update the post
• Remove the post

The Benefits of Auditing Your Content

There are many benefits to reviewing and auditing your past content. Ideally, getting rid of or revamping non-performing posts will improve your site's overall SEO performance. When it comes to updating or rewriting posts, you should seek to optimize the post for SEO purposes by adding more targeted keywords, reformatting and adding relevant metadata. This way your revised post has a better chance of generating the organic traffic you desire.

Tips and Strategies For Auditing Your Blog Content

When auditing your blog content, you'll most likely want to leave alone your best performing content. If you have articles that rank in the top position for your desired keywords, there is no need to alter them. It is the blog posts that get little to no traffic that you want to pay attention to the most. Here are some more tips and pointers to consider when reevaluating your past content:

• Use an SEO crawler to scan your site and give you useful data that you can use to evaluate the quality and performance of your posts. This process can help you prioritize the worst performing posts to remedy first.
• Establish criteria for what you consider a quality post. According to Google, quality posts are unique, relevant, user-friendly and engaging. If one of your posts doesn't meet those standards then you should remove it or rewrite it.
• Avoid duplicate content. If you have multiple posts that are too similar, consider consolidating the content into a single post to maximize its effectiveness. Redirect the old URLs to the new post.
• Images and videos encourage visitors to spend more time on your page, which helps boost your overall SEO performances.  If your past posts are lacking visual content, adding it now could give you a boost.
• Dead links and broken embeds can hurt your page performance. Fix and replace these when updating your posts.

Quality is Better than Quantity

Remember that when it comes to content, quality is better than quantity.

Audit your blog regularly and you'll hopefully see your traffic and keyword rankings improve over time. When in doubt, you can always hire a freelancer to perform an SEO site audit on your blog.