Why We Recommend Re-Publishing Old Blog Content
In many cases, it’s not always your most recently published blogs that drive the most traffic to your website, or that help to position you as an authority in your field. The Pareto Principle, as it applies to this context, states that 20% of your content will generate 80% of your business, and that 20% of your content will be comprised of all your most popular blogs.
The important thing to keep in mind about this is that would be well worth your while to use analytics to find out which of your blogs generate reader interest and which of them don’t. If some of your more recent blogs are found to be lacking in reader interest, you should quickly follow up with newer blogs that have more sure-fire appeal, or that have demonstrated popular appeal in the past.
In other words, it could be to your advantage to re-publish old blogs that were proven to have high reader interest, and simply update those old blogs with new information, or with an entirely new twist. This discussion will center on why re-publishing old blogs can be extremely effective for your business, and why this approach might even be more advantageous than producing entirely new material every week or every month.
Your old blog has slipped to the second page
If one of your older blogs has slipped to the second or third page of results returned by Google, chances are it won’t be seen again by very many users, if at all. It’s well-known that at least 90% of all Google users will not proceed beyond the first page of results, so if one of your older articles has slipped off the first page, it’s probably now in No Man’s Land.
By taking an article that was popular when it was first published and updating it, you may get sufficient attention to push you right back onto page one, where your information will again be seen by throngs of readers. By contrast, if you leave that good article languishing on page two or beyond, it will continue to be pushed further down the rankings by all the newer articles being published with the same type of content. If your original article is still fresh and relevant, you might achieve similar results by optimizing it for SEO, and then re-publishing it.
The old article is still popular but needs to be freshened up
Whenever an Internet user comes across one of your older posts via a Google search, it’s entirely possible that he/she might abandon it anyway, simply because it’s an older post. It happens quite often that people who are searching for a specific type of content are looking for recent articles on the subject, rather than those from one year, two years, or more in the past.
By updating your article and giving it a current date, you can overcome this potential pitfall, and give readers fresh material to read on the same type of content you originally posted. Even a few small updates might be enough to renew reader interest in your original article, and show them that this is an active piece of content which you really feel is relevant.
The nature of the article calls for periodic updates
Some articles are written intentionally to be updated every so often with new information, such as statistics from a recent time frame. There are many kinds of content which quickly become dated, and which require regular updates to keep them current, and if you’ve written one like this, it’s a natural for updating and re-publishing.
If you originally wrote an article about topics like social media marketing, new applications and tools, or emerging technology, these are all subjects that can change very quickly, even within a few months. By updating a popular old article that you wrote at one time with the new information that has become available, you can retain the popularity of the original article by including all the latest information.
Take advantage of Google search engine changes
Google changes its search algorithms every year, and sometimes more frequently than that, because it’s always trying to provide Internet searchers with content that will be as useful as possible. Since these changes are generally announced to the public at some point, you can take advantage of any modifications to search algorithms by updating an old article you wrote to include features that appeal to the new strategy.
As an example, Google now places less emphasis on simply matching specific keywords, and instead makes use of algorithms which attempt to determine what your post is all about. You can react to this important change by de-emphasizing keywords in your old article, and possibly using variants of them to replace repetitive use of the original keywords. If you were to leave your original article alone, the fact that it’s stuffed with keywords might be enough to push it back to the second or third page of Google search results.
By updating and re-publishing your old articles, you’ll save time and effort, and boost your SEO rankings in the process. You’ll also preserve some of your best content for new readers so that it can be seen time and time again.
Heather Hart
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