Blogging is one of the most effective ways to engage your target audience. It helps you publish content around relevant topics and attract the right people to your site.
However, you can’t publish blogs and forget about them. They require regular updates to engage the intended audience segments and help you grow your authority.
It’s a common misconception that you have to keep producing new content to stay relevant. It’s one of the reasons why many forget about optimizing their old posts while they’re busy churning out new content.
It’s unwise to let your old content catch the dust. Your blogs need some fine-tuning from time to time to help you drive the same results or better.
However, it may be a challenge to identify the content that requires necessary updates. We’re here to help you with that. We’ll provide you with five easy steps to review your existing articles for updates.
Why Review Existing Articles
Before we provide you with the steps to review your published articles for content updates, let’s talk about why you should review existing articles in the first place.
1) SEO Benefits
Climbing the SERPs isn’t easy. Maybe it would have been fine just to upload your content and forget about it back in the day. Nowadays, you have to make sure that it’s fresh and relevant to attract the right people.
Search engines, especially the market giant Google, which has over 79.35% of the share in the industry, love fresh, accurate, and relevant information. So, when you update your content, you kind of notify search engines to check your refined version.
Search engines announce changes to their algorithms on a periodic basis. These changes dictate the current SEO best practices. So, there’s a chance that what worked for you before may not be relevant anymore.
When search engines crawl the necessary changes you make to your blogs, it often leads to better rankings in search results. As said earlier, many don’t update their content after they’ve published it. So, by updating your blogs, you automatically get an advantage over them.
Updating your content helps you rectify SEO mistakes you previously made. Plus, you can mold your content as per the current algorithm changes and get better results than before.
2) User Experience Benefits
Your audience’s needs and interests change over time. The same goes for the trends in your respective industry. What used to pique the interest of the intended audience may not be relevant anymore. It calls for you to make changes to the content published.
The core objective of creating content is to educate a relevant audience and answer the questions in their minds. It’s how you engage the right people and capture quality leads for your sales funnel.
People seek solutions to their problems, which may change over time. You must facilitate their access to relevant and valuable information to build trust and grow authority in your respective niche.
You can’t expect to offer a seamless experience to your visitors through outdated information, broken links, unoptimized images, and a page that takes forever to load. Updates make your content more valuable, readable, and engaging, helping you offer a better experience for your visitors.
3) Competition
Some don’t take content updates seriously. However, you may also find players in your industry who consistently update their old posts while publishing new ones around relevant topics.
It’s a no-brainer to figure out the ones that are in the lead. However, the most important question is, who do you consider your rivals? The ones who publish obsolete information, or the ones brilliantly cashing in on the new trends and optimizing their content as per the industry’s best practices
You compete in the race to drive more traffic. If you’re complacent, others will take the lead, making it impossible for you to catch up.
Keeping your content fresh is one of the ways to maintain your current position in the digital landscape as someone who offers a valuable perspective. The moment you take your eye off the ball, your competition will dethrone you from your current search rankings and surpass you.
4) Content Obsolescence
You leverage different information sources to produce quality content for your audience. The source may alter the facts or statistics that you used, along with their take on a particular topic. It calls for you to conduct your research again.
The relevance of your content changes over time. There may be different factors causing it that are beyond your control. All you can do is keep up with the change by making necessary modifications to your content.
Outdated content isn’t helpful. As a matter of fact, there’s a chance you may spread misinformation through it, which can harm your credibility. So, you must regularly update your content and make sure that it’s valuable for those who access it.
5) Intent
You produce quality content to get more eyeballs and engage the right audience. Your ability to engage your audience depends on the intent you target. The way people look for information online changes over time. The reasons why your audience accesses certain content you publish won’t always be the same.
Hence, you must review your content periodically and make sure that it still perfectly aligns with what the intended audience is searching for right now.
Updating your content helps you align the information you publish with the current search intent, making your articles more likely to reach the right people and help them find viable solutions to their problems.
Steps to Review Existing Articles
Now that you know why you must review your content periodically and keep it up-to-date, we’ll provide you with the steps to help you through the process.
Step 1: Identify Content Needing Updates
There are a few things that can help you identify articles that require an update. You can call them the performance indicators for the content you produce. If you see a performance drop for some of the articles published on your site, you need to pay attention to those content pieces.
The first thing you need to monitor is your traffic. A drop in traffic suggests that your content is losing its value. You won’t see a drastic change overnight. It will be a steady decline. However, the graph will consistently go down. That’s when you know that those specific articles require an update.
Another thing you must consider is declining engagement. If you see a steady decline in the time visitors spend on particular pages and an increase in the bounce rate, it indicates that your content isn’t engaging enough. It’s not resonating with readers or aligning with their interests.
Your search engine rankings are also important. If a post used to rank well for a specific term but has slipped down the search results page, it’s a strong candidate for an update. Losing your search engine rankings means that either your content is obsolete or your competitors have published something better.
However, it’s not always bad signals that may help you identify articles that require an update. You can update your blogs based on potential quick wins or keyword opportunities. Sometimes, a few minor tweaks in your articles can boost their current search engine rankings or overall performance. So, you must keep an eye out for low-hanging opportunities.
Step 2: Prioritize Content for Updates
Once you have identified articles you must update, the next step is shortlisting the ones needing your immediate attention. You may have hundreds of blogs on your website. Updating them all can be overwhelming and unrealistic. Prioritizing is key to making things manageable and effective. You must think about utilizing your time and resources efficiently.
You can prioritize your articles based on two things: potential impact and the effort it takes to update them. It’s a no-brainer that the articles that have the potential to make the most impact with little update effort should be your top priority.
The next ones on your list should be blogs that may require high effort during the update process, but are able to contribute to high impact. You should mark the rest of your content as low priority. However, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t update it.
Step 3: Review Content
Once you have picked your articles for an update, it’s time to review them. You must read your articles carefully and try to identify the room for improvement. You must also go through the comment section. Sometimes, your audience helps point out the issues for you.
The first thing you need to check is the accuracy of the information in your article. You need to check the facts, statistics, dates, names, and even steps mentioned in your articles.
You must also see if the information is still relevant to your target audience. For example, if you published an article on SEO best practices, you need to see if the tips you recommended are still useful. Your responsibility is to make sure that your content answers the questions your audience is currently asking.
The readability of your content is also important. Your message should be clear and phrased in simple words. You must also assess the flow of your content and see if it needs improvement. You must also review the keywords that you target through your articles. Analyzing the current trends helps.
Don’t forget about the elements that contribute to the user experience. See if your content contains any broken links, evaluate the quality of images that you used, and assess the load time of your pages. All these factors make your content relevant and help you offer a seamless experience to your visitors.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
Once you have identified the problem areas, it’s time to take action. You must edit your posts and make the necessary changes. A common mistake many make when updating their content is making changes to please search engines. You are to keep your audience in the center of it all.
Improving your content isn’t just about refining your title tags, updating your meta descriptions, crafting punchy headlines, optimizing your images, fixing the links, boosting readability, and keyword optimization. You are to make sure that your content delivers value to your readers.
You have to improve anything and everything that complements the user experience. Creating content to help people out is an effective way to surpass your competition, grow your authority, and build a relatable brand image.
Step 5: Promote Updated Content
Once you have updated your content, it’s time to promote it. You must treat your updated content as if it’s your brand-new post. It may not apply to articles with minor tweaks. However, you need to promote articles with significant changes.
You must share the updated posts on all relevant social media channels and online communities. You can even include the posts in your email newsletter, informing your subscribers about the updates and the new information they’ll find.
However, running paid ad campaigns will be an overkill. You must stick to the organic marketing methods to get the best results from your efforts. Getting people to notice your updated content is as important as optimizing the post itself. So, you shouldn’t slack off on the promotional activity.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it: we covered the whole process for you. We told you why you need to update your content and how to review your articles for an update.
Updates keep your content relevant. They help you engage the intended audience segments and grow your authority in the industry. By regularly updating your content, you make sure that your articles perform and help you maintain a consistent flow of traffic.
If you’ve been struggling to schedule content updates, the recommendations we provided may help.
