It’s Time to Optimize Old Blogs for SEO
There’s a treasure trove of usable, valuable, and low-effort ways to drive new traffic to your site, and the best part is, it’s already ON your website.
Want to know what it is?
It’s your old content.
The blog you’ve kept up with since 2014, as well as the evergreen content like FAQs and tutorials, are just bursting with new ways to be updated and used for a new strategy.
Let’s explore some of the ways refreshing your old content can benefit your business.
Why You Need a Content Refresh
SEO Best Practices are Changing
First of all, SEO isn’t dead; it’s just taking a backseat to some younger members of the optimization family.
AI-generated overviews on most Google results can lead to a much lower click-through rate than sites have experienced in the past. We’ve also seen a switch from traditional Google searches to ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs)
Because of this, there’s a larger focus on optimizing content to be picked up and cited by AI.
AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, focuses on creating content that is easier for AI to generate into AI overviews, and GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, aims to create content that can get recognized by LLMs
A content refresh is a great way to revitalize traffic and ensure you’re staying up to date on best practices.
Refreshing older content can:
Refresh your keywords and backlinks for SEO
Format your content for GEO
Wording your content to ensure it's recognized by AEO
Fresh Eyes + Old Content = New Opportunities
Revisiting older content, especially older content that performed really well, is a great way to
1. Figure out what content your audience resonates with
2. Get ideas for new content
Take note of what content performed best and try to find a common thread between them. From there, you can add that into your larger content strategy and begin brainstorming new content ideas.
You can easily take a piece of long-form content and break it into bite-sized pieces to scatter through your content strategy. Any longer piece of writing or data set could easily become-
Social posts
New blog topics
White papers
Case studies
Infographics
Update Data, Facts, and Information
Google uses multiple factors to decide how a website will rank, but the two that are relevant here are update frequency and up-to-date information. Updating older blogs and web content can help signal to Google that you have fresh content and revitalize web traffic to those pages.
This doesn’t only apply to blogs and articles, but to FAQ, how-to guides, tips, guides, tutorials, and other evergreen content.
Outside of ranking and results, it helps increase the trust that buyers have in your company. If they know they can come to you for accurate, up-to-date information, it will help them feel more confident in your company.
Updated content can then be added to your content strategy and promoted again as social posts or included in emails.
Formatting for Visual Cohesion
As a site grows and a company changes, it’s easy to overlook the effect that has on the visual cohesion of your blog. With each update to brand guidelines, the blog should be revisited and checked for adherence. Do the images used look outdated or pixelated? Is formatting consistent across all blogs? These visual differences can affect how professional and modern your site looks, and though it may seem like a small detail, it can really make a difference.
This is also a great time to check for broken links, as that can affect your Google ranking.
It’s Time to Give Your Blog a Refresh
A content refresh is a great way to make your old content work for you. It’s a high-impact, low-effort strategy that can really make a difference when it comes to web traffic, trust, and your overall content plan.
Ready to refresh your blog to optimize SEO?
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