How to Update Old Blog Posts and Boost SEO

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Got a lot of old blog posts that you’re hoping to use for SEO? You can give old content a new lease on life and generate MORE site traffic. Here are ways how!

As you know, blogging lets you optimize your website using relevant keywords and helpful content. This way, your readers could find your content on the internet easily. And even if you’ve built a huge archive of blog posts, you can upcycle your blogs to keep readers and followers engaged. Here are ways how:

 

Review and Refresh Old Content

Go to your list of old blogs right now and review each one. See how you can add a fresh spin on old posts. You can update the images, optimize the visuals with keyword phrases, edit the information with new ones, or add a list of related blog posts. There are so many ways of expanding upon existing content, so they read new again!

 

New Visuals

You don’t want to bore your audience by republishing a 3,000-word product review without new visuals to break down the post a couple of paragraphs at a time, right? 

Visuals make any text content even more engaging. You can make old posts look new by adding new images and videos or updating old ones. You can also create new visuals like infographics or slide shows to break the monotony. 

 

Optimize Old Headings

Take some time to update every old post’s headings so you can improve your blog site’s SEO while also giving old posts a new lease on life. The main headings are the perfect places to insert your best-performing keywords – heading 1, 2, or 3. Using headings to break down a long post improves the readability and scannability of your blog posts. Also, blog posts with main headings look better at a glance than posts with uniform text size. 

You can also insert headings to old blog posts to optimize them, such as adding a title to lists or to define sections of the blog post. Look for every opportunity to add a heading for SEO.

 

Add Internal Links

Yet another strategy that will improve your SEO while driving traffic to low-performing blog posts. Internal links are URLs that lead to other blog posts. Check your archives right now and look for your highest-performing blog posts. Then, look for related old posts that do not get much love from your readers. Now embed the related posts’ links into the high-performing blog posts and let your readers rediscover posts that they may have missed before but would love to read now. 

 

Fix Broken Links

Broken links are links on blog posts that lead to other content. Sometimes when you’re linking to other websites, the posts are either taken down, or the URL changed. When this happens, the link on your site will lead to nowhere. 

The broken links have to be updated all the time because it can hurt your SEO by telling search engines that your blog posts are not updated. You can use a broken link checker to zero in on these links every month or fix them whenever they crop up. 

 

Work on Load Speeds

You only have 3 seconds to catch the attention of your reader because online users are quite impatient. If your blog site is slow and clunky, users will move to faster websites. Keeping tabs on the loading speed helps improve your website rankings while compelling readers to stay longer on your site.

You can use free tools to assess your site’s loading speed, such as PageSpeed Insights. To boost the loading speeds, get rid of graphics and visuals that are slowing your website down. Also, make a habit out of compressing your images before uploading them to your website. Free tools like TinyJPG and TinyPNG will compress your images without affecting the resolution. 

 

As you can see, it doesn’t really take a lot of work to update old blogs for better SEO. If you want to achieve longer-lasting and consistent results, you need to refresh your blog posts regularly. We suggest reviewing your blog posts twice or once a year to see which of your old posts need an update. Prioritize on your best and worst-performing blog posts, see what needs to be done to enhance SEO.