If you’ve been blogging since it was called weblogging, you’ll be chuffed with the burgeoning blogging renaissance (thank you, Substack). If that perfectly describes you, now might be the time for joint supplements, but also, it’s time to update old blog posts.

Conscientious types already audit their content, but often life gets in the way, which means you’ll be sayin’…

Perhaps you haven’t had a mind to update old blog posts since the dawn of your website, and if that’s the case, get ready to clean house with this easy-peasy guide.

Here’s what we’re covering in this TL;DR article:

Yes, there’s a lot to get through.

Why bother to update old blog posts?

Outdated blogs are a millstone around the neck of your SEO. Old content is dead content. Everything published must earn its place. If irrelevant and inaccurate articles exist on your site, take action for the sake of your audience and online visibility. (Nope, updating the published date isn’t enough. Google knows when you’re gaming the system, and in turn, the user. Don’t be that guy.)

Assess what you have.

Your website provider probably has an ‘export content’ function (WordPress does). However, that’s mostly for transferring content to a new website. If you try that option, you might need to convert the output file and format the content. I’m old-fashioned (coz I’m old), so I prefer to scan the list of published blogs and record them on a spreadsheet.

That becomes my Blog Auditing Spreadsheet, and I include the following:

1. Date of the audit
2. Blog post title
3. Focus (main page) keyword
4. Original publish date

This blog article you’re reading is one of my best-performing. It not only lands at the top of page one, but it’s also linked in the AI Overview. As it remains relevant to my site, I update it regularly.

Use a focus keyword.

You’d be surprised how many blogs don’t target keywords. It’s never too late to add a focus keyword (a main page keyword) when you update old blog posts.

👉 >>Keywords still matter to SEO (for now)<<

Before you panic about the oodles of keyword research awaiting you, batch your freshly made Blog Auditing Spreadsheet into two groups:

1. The content you optimise for search
2. Everything else

Potential clients who know you exist won’t be googling you. Blogs for organic traffic lean towards the general side. Potential clients with brand awareness usually want content specific to your business.

Concentrate on the blogs that are SEO-friendly, AKA searchable. Those are the ones to find focus keywords for.

👉 >>Blogging is dead: the lie that won’t die<<

To understand how search-worthy your old blogs are, run Google searches using their current titles.

This will do three things:

1. Reveal search intent (intent to buy/learn)
2. Reveal how well the content matches your query
3. Reveal alternative suggestions (helping you adapt existing content)

Finding results from the searches doesn’t mean there’s an appetite for the content. Until you delve deeper with a keyword tool, you won’t know if the keyword/phrase has low/medium/high volume search results.

Full blog titles are too long to input into keyword tools, so decide what word or short phrase from the title is the most important/relevant to the content. Pop that into a keyword tool (WordStream’s free keyword tool is great for this) and see what occurs.

Sometimes the results will be disappointing. Search volumes can be low or nonexistent. If the blog holds value to those with brand awareness, keep it in the ‘everything else pile’.

Once keywords are assigned, add them to these areas:

• Title
• Page URL
• Snippets
• Subheading
• Image alt. titles
• Sympathetically throughout the content

SEO plugins like Yoast, RankMath, and AIOSEO make adding keywords easy.

Edit old blog articles.

Think ‘evergreen content’. With that in mind, ask yourself this: does each blog article provide relevant subject-based information? And is all that information correct? If the answer to both questions is “absolutely not”, make the changes or trash them/relegate them to the draft folder.

When you edit old blog posts, do this:

• Speak like your business
• Speak to your audience
• Ooze your values
• Reflect your offering
• Have purpose
• Make them well-written and constructed
• Guide the user towards action

👉 >>Learn how to write engaging content<<

Not all call-to-actions (CTAs) are created equal. When you update old blog posts, what CTA is going to fit the content? A soft CTA has low-level commitment (newsletter sign-up). A hard CTA requires a greater investment (a potential client’s time or cash). Soft CTAs are a way to keep in touch with potential clients, but the content will guide what CTA you need.

Optimise blog titles.

Your blog title is your H1 heading. You have one H1 per page:

When you write blog titles, create intrigue, offer a unique point of view.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m terrible at writing blog titles. A headline analyser helps to nudge my noggin into idea-generating mode. I don’t rely on it because, like any AI tool, it makes you sound like every bastard else (which is what Grammarly is trying to do as I type). Since businesses have gone LLM crazy, the race to homogeneity is greater than before.

Some things never change.

(If you need a break from reading this, please go and watch/listen to Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime.)

FYI: when I fiddle with my H1 heading, the page URL (page address) changes. Check yours before publishing. Pop in a page redirect to avoid a broken link.

Format page layout.

Arrange page content in a particular way. We do that for two reasons:

1. To be readable
2. To be crawlable (the thing search engines do)

Almost everything SEO-wise wants the same thing as your site visitors: top-notch user experience (UX).

And that looks like this:

• Contrasting colours
• Easy-to-read fonts
• Image descriptions and alt. field text
• Video subtitles (the ones you can actually follow)
• Video transcripts for learning and long videos
• Auto-play off (for the love of God)
• A table of contents
• Correct heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3, H4)
• Manageable paragraphs
• Clear CTAs

Include an author box.

To stop people thinking “who wrote this shit and on what authority?” add an author box at the end of your blog articles. Google also likes to know who’s publishing stuff, and it’s all down to that rascal, E-E-A-T.

👉 >>E-E-A-T: the SEO principle to feed your website users<<

Check links.

Make sure internal and outbound links work. Also, make sure internal linking is logical and strategic. It’s about quality not quantitiy. If you link to an outbout source, check it still exists (and is relevant). If it isn’t, kill the link/find an alternative.

Use page breadcrumbs.

Website breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation, often below the primary navigation:

Some websites are deeper than the Mariana Trench. Breadcrumbs help users navigate masses of content, but they also help Google. You’re saying, hey, this is the content route/path/road, how wonderful! Google AND the users reply, thank you, very much.

Some SEO plugins offer a breadcrumb menu (AIOSEO does). Check your website provider; they might use them as standard.

Pick a category and add tags.

Just like breadcrumbs, categories and tags enhance user experience. In a website-building context, the word ‘enhance’ is synonymous with ease of use. The blog category is the broad topic many articles fall under:

(The category forms part of the breadcrumb navigation.)

Tags are specific subcategories, and you can use as many as you like:

Categories and tags are clickable, so visitors can view other content that applies to each category and tag. That results in folks staying on your website longer, and we all want that.

Choose a featured image.

When you update old blog posts, add a featured image. They generate the thumbnail you see when a page is shared. A featured image is also another place to add the focus keyword. You type it into the ‘alt. title’ field, and before I get lynched, yes, the alt. title text exists to make images accessible to page reader tools. But guess what? You can do both: add the keyword AND explain what the image is.

Update the publish date.

Google likes new, accurate content.

In WordPress, when I update old blog posts, the original publish date remains the same. I have to perform a ‘quick edit’ and manually change the publish date. My website template doesn’t automatically display a blog post date, so I use a date block:

A typed date will become your first paragraph, and that’s a paragraph with no content (or keyword), so opt for a date block if your website doesn’t automatically display a date.

Add a redirect.

As mentioned before, tinkering with blog titles might fool around with the page URL. Meaning, the old link won’t work. When users click the old link, they’ll get this (not exactly this):

A redirect plugin will guide the user to the new URL. (I use Redirection on my WordPress site.)

Optimise permalink structure.

Each blog post has a permanent address (a permalink). That structure should be geared for crawler bots (Google indexing). Your website dashboard is where you find your permalinks:

I don’t want the bots taking any longer than they have to, scanning the permalink. For me, the blog title takes priority, so I avoid clogging up the URL with the post date and/or post category.

My permalinks are configured like this:

mydomain.com / blogposttitle

In the real world, that looks like this:

Add schema markup.

Schema, AKA structured data, is Google’s love language. (It’s actually the language search engines use to understand content on web pages.) For example, this page you’re reading is an article (if you are still reading). Tell Google you have different content for different things. Things like product pages and service pages. There are loads of schemas to choose from.

I’m not a programmer. I didn’t build my website from the digital ether, and I’m assuming you didn’t either. If that’s the case, even if you had access to your website’s back end, you probably wouldn’t know what to do with it (oo-err). There are plenty of schema markup plugins to choose from.

Most SEO plugins offer basic structured data options. Once you figure out the plugin setup, you can assign the appropriate structured data to each page.

Update page snippets.

Page snippets, AKA meta titles and descriptions, are the page previews you see on search engine results pages (SERPs):

When you update old blog posts, write a custom snippet to improve click-through rates. SEO plugins make adding snippets easy.

Tell Google about content updates.

Submit new/updated content to Google via Google Search Console (GSC).

Here’s how you do that:

1. Copy the page URL
2. Head over to GSC
3. Go to ‘Inspect any URL’ (at the top of the page)
4. Dump the copied URL into the ‘Inspect any URL’ field
5. Click ‘Request Indexing’

Update old blog posts – a summary:

• Assess content
• Add a focus keyword
• Match the keyword with the content
• Make the content easy to digest
• Make the content sound like your business
• Make on-page SEO adjustments
• Submit changes to Google

*BONUS POINT*

If you’ve worked your arse off, slaving over a hot computer, updating old blog posts, you’d better make sure you spread the word. Share an article each day as part of your social media marketing. Send them in your email campaigns—whatever you do, tell your peeps that you have helpful stuff for them to apply to their business.

Article first published, 3rd October 2024

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