By mvolpe.hubspot@gmail.com (Mike Volpe)

Blogging is not a major piece of artwork like the Sistine Chapel, but there is an art to making your blog a masterpiece. Blogs are a combination of timely and evergreen content.

Timely content focuses on trends, news articles, and pop culture events, while evergreen content stays relevant and provides value for a long time. It is rare to update timely content simply because it’s old news; however, there is value in updating and reviving old evergreen content.

Leveraging old blog posts and their established place on the web can extend the life of your best content. It is especially beneficial when your content has reached a traffic plateau — a period where your growth rate is stagnant.

John Bonini, the Director of Marketing at Databox, says, “Your best opportunity for increasing organic traffic short-term is in updating the content you’ve already published, not (exclusively) publishing new stuff.” Updating this content can boost your ranking on search engine page results (SERPs) and drive more traffic to your post.

Traffic to your post also comes from backlinks. It takes time to acquire backlinks to new content. Alternatively, old content is less likely to receive new backlinks because the information is outdated. Updating old blog posts can help you keep the backlinks your page has already received and acquire new backlinks by reinforcing the value and authority of your content with current information.

Imagine a years-old blog post listing “Minority-Owned Restaurants in Charlotte, North Carolina.” Looking at this post today might have some use, but overall, this post is severely outdated. Consider how fickle the restaurant business can be, especially in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a chance that some of the restaurants on this list are no longer open. Other minority-owned restaurants could have opened up in their place. Updating this blog post with current information will immediately increase its value and improve its standing with users and search engines.

Reviving an old blog post for SEO isn’t a one-and-done process. Let’s take a look at how you can update your content with a few key steps.

How To Revive An Old Blog Post

Let’s turn your blog post into a masterpiece. Before reviving an old blog post, how do you choose which posts are worth bringing back to life? To hit short-term growth goals, John Bonini recommends updating the following content:

• The Biggest Losers: Content that’s decayed (lost organic traffic) at a high volume over the last 3-6 months.
• The Almost Famous: Content that’s currently ranking on page 2.
• The Nobodies: Content that’s targeting high-intent, high-volume keywords that are not ranking at all.

Bonini suggests that updating old content can drive organic traffic to previously successful but declining posts, and boost the ranking of content sitting on page 2 of the SERPs. For blog posts that are not ranking at all due to high-volume keywords and keyword difficulty, consider a complete overhaul to rewrite …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron