Quick question, what do you do with outdated blog posts?
Usually, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. For some reason, the majority of us, content marketing folks, are obsessed with constantly creating new content instead of taking advantage of our old blog posts.
But here’s the thing—with Google officially getting smarter about content and its quality, so should we. And just like convincing the existing customers to buy from you again, updating the existing content for SEO is just much easier and more reasonable in the long term.
To update, or not to update, that is the question
I get it, having complete control over your content inventory and choosing which (if any) posts to update is not simple. Fortunately for all of us, though, there are tools, frameworks, and tips to guide us when republishing content
What you will learn:
- Why should you update old blog posts
- What to do with outdated blog content
- How to choose what posts to update
- How to improve old posts
Ready when you are.
Why should you update old articles?
Having outdated content on your blog might not seem like a big deal. Sure, Google is not going to punish you for it, but there are quite a few opportunities you’re missing out on.
1. Outdated content usually means low (or non-existent) organic traffic and conversions.
Both search engines and web visitors prefer fresh, up-to-date content, and anything else is not likely to stay high on the SERPs for very long. You (or someone from your team) have put a significant amount of time and effort into it, and it’s all gone to waste now. Don’t let that happen!
2. Content ideation can be tiring, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time.
Constantly coming up with new content ideas for your content marketing strategy can be fun, but if you’ve been doing that for a while, you’re bound to run out of them sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be nice to stop chasing new content for a change?
3. Outdated content can hurt your brand (and your ego).
I can’t tell you how many times I cringed after finding an old piece of content I once published. It probably seemed pretty great years ago, but things change.
As an industry, we’re so much better at creating quality blog posts than we were even months ago. Outdated articles (especially ones that are misleading, incorrect, or just bad) simply reflect poorly on your brand.
What to do with outdated posts, then?
I hope that, by now, you’re convinced that updating old posts is worth giving a try. There are at least a few things that you can do to address outdated content:
Optimize old content for SEO
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh outdated content
Some blog posts might have a specific year in a title, or discuss current events that become outdated with time. The rest of the actual blog post might be “evergreen”—in such cases, the only thing you have to update is the date, for example.
Rewrite old blog posts
When the content quality is low (but the potential is still there), there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing—you’re still saving some time and effort on content ideation here. The groundwork is there already, now go take care of that poor content quality with an updated post.
Delete old articles
Should you delete your blog content? Definitely. If the content is completely out-of-date, the quality is low, and there are no relevant keywords that the piece could rank for— don’t hesitate. Set up a redirect (to a related blog post or blog homepage), and go ahead.
Promote old blog posts
In some cases, updating old content can be as simple as giving it a little boost. The easiest way to go about it is to build backlinks to an old piece of content manually and invest some time in repurposing and distribution to attract links organically.
Relevant backlinks are known for being an important ranking factor, and increasing their number is likely to affect the position of your content in search results.
Now that you know what to do with your old posts, the question remains…
How to update blog posts for SEO?
Alright, now let’s get to the practical part.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to update your old blog posts to boost SEO performance.
1. Choose blog posts to update
The first step is choosing which blog posts to update. For that, you can consult Google Search Console (GSC).
- Head over to Search Results report in the Performance tab.
- Under the Compare tab in the Date filter, select Compare last 3 months to previous period.
- Enable only the Total clicks tile.
- In the Pages tab, sort the Clicks Difference column in descending order.
Doing so will reveal your pages that have lost traffic compared to how they were doing 3 months ago. This is where the biggest opportunities lie.
2. Prioritize which pages to update
As you’ve already sorted pages that have declined in traffic, you can now prioritize them based on a number of factors.
Largest difference
These are pages that have seen the greatest decline in traffic, and fixing them could give you a significant boost in clicks—they were already ranking pretty well before, so they just need a refresh to return to their glory days.
If your main goal is to increase traffic, you can first prioritize updating these pages.
Commercial pages
If sales and leads are more important to you, you can focus on updating your commercial pages. These can be your pricing, product, or landing pages.
Even though they won’t have the highest visitors, updating them could make a difference to your bottom line.
3. Optimize your pages
You can optimize your pages using the Surfer Content Editor (CE).
Simply import the page into the Content Editor by pasting its URL or do a 1-click import with our free WordPress extension (if you're publishing on WordPress).
CE starts by examining the top-ranking articles for your target keyword.
It identifies the heading structures and word count these successful articles use to help you understand how to organize your content effectively.
The tool also pinpoints the critical keywords and phrases that the top articles include, along with the frequencies at which they appear. This way, you can incorporate them into your content to increase relevance and authority.
As you can see, there were many relevant keywords that my page was missing.
Your goal is to bring up the article's Content Score to a green rating. This is a metric that Surfer uses to judge how well your pages are optimized for your target keyword.
Doing this will ensure that your pages include the right keywords, optimal keyword density, and appropriate header tags.
This way, the score acts as a benchmark for your content's performance in search rankings. A higher Content Score suggests that your content is more likely to be deemed relevant and authoritative by search engines.
This relevance and authority are key to climbing back up in the search engine results pages (SERPs), enabling you to reclaim rankings that may have slipped over time.
Repeat the process multiple times across the pages you identified in step 1.
4. Rewrite content
Sometimes, you’ll need to rewrite substantial parts of your content to keep pace with evolving industry updates or shifts in user search intent.
Rewriting significant portions of your content can seem daunting, but it's crucial for maintaining the accuracy and freshness that users and search engines value.
You can go about it manually, following the Content Editor guidelines (see step 3). Or, if you are refreshing an old Surfer AI article, Surfy, our AI writing assistant, can help you with the rewriting process. You can find Surfy within the AI Content Editor.
Here’s what Surfy can do for you:
- Adapt the article tone of voice
- Support your content with examples
- Elaborate on existing content or trim it down
- Link to other articles
- Research the article
In case of more significant updates, you might want to consider a full rewrite of your article and expedite this process with Surfer AI.
From within the Content Editor, click on Write with Surfer AI.
A new window will open, where you can configure your article settings before Surfer AI gets to writing it.
There, you can specify:
- The desired format of your article: Blog post, Product Roundup, or Single Product Review
- The tone that best suits your content's voice
- A setting to minimize AI content detection by search engines
- A choice of organic competitors to analyze for strategic insights
- An option to add custom knowledge relevant to your content's subject matter
Based on your specifications, Surfer AI will then generate an article outline with detailed talking points under each heading.
You can choose to edit the outline and add your own talking points or specialized knowledge to it.
When ready, click on the Let's write button.
Surfer AI will then take into consideration all your preferences and combine them with insights for your target topic to create an SEO-optimized blog post in about 20 minutes.
5. Update outdated H1s and title tags
It's important to update outdated H1s and title tags, especially in cases where content references previous years. Content with outdated years can quickly seem irrelevant to users and search engines, leading to decreased traffic and trustworthiness.
You can type the following into Google Search to identify the articles that have previous years in their title:
This will reveal old articles that you need to update. You can then head to your CMS to update the H1 with the current year.
To check on your title tags, you can use the Surfer Audit tool.
- Head to Surfer Audit
- Enter your page URL and target keywords
- Select the country and device preferences and check the Sentiment box
- Click Create Audit
The Audit will reveal a list of optimization opportunities. For this case, you need to focus on two reports: the Exact keywords and Title and meta description report.
First, look at the Exact keywords report. It will show you whether an exact match of your main keyword is present in the title tag and H1.
Second, take a look at the Title and meta description report. This report will show whether these elements are present and whether you need to optimize the character count based on what’s working for your competitors.
Lastly, update the content inside these articles based on the previous steps.
6. Take control of your blog
Brace yourself, this step might take a while to complete—especially if your blog post is a few years old.
If you’re taking over as a content manager, or haven’t really tracked your posts before, you can start by downloading the Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawling your blog.
You can then export the results and have a solid list of all your articles—respective URLs, titles, word count, meta tags (yes, they should be updated every once in a while, too!), and more. A complete list of your posts should help you audit your content more effectively.
This brings us to the next point…
7. Audit your blog content
If you’ve just started a blog or haven’t been publishing much since the beginning, finding stuff to update is not that challenging. The more content you have, the harder it gets.
The good news is: with a full list of blog posts that you’ve just exported, you can easily run an audit. I, personally, favor Andreea Macoveiciuc’s approach to auditing content, which, at the time, gave me a full overview of over 200 articles published for Prowly Magazine, and how they were performing in SERPs.
There are lots of other useful templates and SEO tools to use at this stage, depending on what metrics you’re interested in.
To make the whole process a little easier and faster, you can always run your articles through Surfer’s SEO Audit Tool to get solid suggestions on how to improve them.
8. Maintain a content inventory
Once you have an understanding of what posts are out there and how they are performing, it’s time to keep things even more organized with an inventory. A content inventory will also help you identify duplicate content to get rid of.
Instead of using good old Excel or Google Sheets, I recommend having your inventory in a project management tool—or, specifically, Airtable.
Airtable makes it much easier to keep track of, categorize, and filter your blog content. You can easily check when it was published or updated, what was the main keyword you were targeting, and quickly find any other details that are relevant to you.
If it seems like a lot of work…It’s because it is. With time, however, having control over your blog and regularly searching for potential improvements gets easier, especially with a website content update process in place.
Best practices to update blog posts
Apart from relying on Surfer, there are a few best practices to follow when improving, adding content, or rewriting old blog posts.
Often, you’d just hear that you should “create better content”, but what does it mean, exactly?
Well, take into account the following:
- Search intent - satisfying search intent (the purpose of the online search) is a primary goal for Google, and should be a primary goal for you, too. If you want to rank for “a detailed guide to X”, for example, you should provide the user with a detailed guide—not a price list of your services.
To put it simply, make sure your readers can find what they are actually looking for. - Page authority & accuracy - ideally, all your posts should be well-researched, informative, factually accurate, and relevant. You don’t necessarily have to chase metrics like keyword length. Instead, just make every piece of content as comprehensive and exhaustive as possible.
- Target keyword - when creating or updating your blog post for SEO, you should always strive to rank for a relevant target keyword and pick a few secondary keywords once you’re at it. Then, make sure to optimize the blog post! After all, you don’t want to keep adding “The Nobodies” to your inventory.
*If you’re struggling with content optimization, you can always enroll in Surfer’s SEO Writing Masterclass for free. - Readability - keywords and SEO aside, your content should be readable. Think about the user experience—write shorter sentences, break up long paragraphs, check for typos and grammar mistakes, use descriptive headings and visuals to illustrate your point. Speaking of…
- Visuals - if possible, always try to break the walls of text with relevant visuals. Especially if your goal is to explain something and show examples in use, make sure your visuals can support it.
Don’t forget to optimize images for SEO as well—the least you can do is compress them and add alt texts. - Competitiveness - look at the page-one results for your target keyword and check what you're competing against.
Can your content stand out? There’s no point in creating any blog post if you can’t actually pull it off and add value to what’s already out there. - Backlinks - have a look at internal and external links. Are there any broken links in your content (you can use Chrome extensions like Check my Links to look them up), can you add internal links (search in your inventory to find relevant articles to link to and from!), are there any external links point to the piece (use software like Ahrefs to find out), and can you build any more?
For Google and web visitors, links pointing to your blog work like “votes of confidence” and are an important ranking factor.
Guess who’s back? Your old articles
Once your updated blog post ticks all the boxes mentioned above, it’s time to republish it. Keep in mind that it’s unlikely to be a one-time thing, though. Search results change dynamically, and so do your content rankings and traffic.
That’s precisely why using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Surfer can help you keep tabs on how and when to update content for SEO to make sure you’re not wasting any opportunity and get the organic traffic you deserve.
