Updating Blog Articles: How to freshen up your content! [NEU 2021]

Update Blog Articles: This is why it’s so important

Learn how to use small updates to boost your most important posts and put an end to their decline.

Anyone who does content marketing, or publishes blog posts regularly for other reasons, should make sure that all important posts are always up to date. Especially the time around the turn of the year is particularly suitable for cleaning up your own site. Why?

New year – new content:

For one thing, it makes it less easy to forget, and for another, this time period allows you to include the most recent year in your title. A small thing, many of you will think. But think about which search result you would click on if you had a choice: 2021 or 2020? Even though there may be only a few days between the two releases, the year shows a psychological effect.
By theway: if you are thinking of just changing the year of your blog post to be more relevant in the SERPS, you are wrong. Once user- /inside discover that your post is actually from 2019, they’ll be gone faster than you can say bounce rate. In addition, you are also gambling away trust in your site, because what goal you are pursuing with such a “pointless” update of your article, should be clear to most at this point.

Update blog posts: turn old into new

The longer your content has been online, the more likely it is to be at least partially outdated – and nobody likes outdated content, especially Google!
Imagine you are looking for nutrition tips and you only find on rank 1 the ones that were already classified as wrong by scientists many years ago. Well, sure, some things never change – if you’re looking for tips on how to best plant tulips, you’re just as likely to be served by information from 2010 as you are by the latest information from 2021 – but the search engines don’t care.

Stop your blog articles from sinking!

In order for the search engine results displayed to you to be relevant from a time perspective, the rankings of your blog articles are continually dropping, making room for new content.

With a little effort, however, you can stop the decline of your content – and how to do that, you will learn now:

Identify the right contributions:

Before you get started, you should think about which content you can best update, because not every article is suitable for this. Basically, you should choose content that already works well – or has worked well – and is naturally “evergreen“. “Evergreen” Content means that the content is not bound to a temporal event and will therefore still be relevant for readers in the distant future.

The Google update from 2012 was probably one of the hottest topics for many SEOs at the time – but updating such an article in 2021 is understandably just not a good idea anymore.

However, a post about how best to grow tomatoes is still a very relevant question in 2021 – and there will certainly be a tip or two, or a tool or two, here that didn’t exist the previous year. So you will quickly find a way to add to your article.

What you need to keep in mind when updating your article:

It’s down to the wire!
Once you’ve identified the articles you want to refresh for new readers, it’s time to write. The important thing here is that you still put in enough effort, even if you have actually already mentally finished with the topic of the article.

Update blog articles: the minimum word count

The update of your article should be at least 50 words long, so that the search engines actually recognize that the content of your post has been revised. If you want to add more than 50 words to your post, that’s no problem – but it really shouldn’t be less.

Learning from experience

Check the past performance of your contribution. What keyword has the post ranked for so far and what are the results? Might he have brought to light different results than originally thought? That’s another benefit of updating posts after the fact (and regularly).

Check Google Search Console

Your keywords are no longer “just assumptions”. In the Google Search Console you can see with a few clicks what results your work has brought to light and now further optimize for these keywords.

• Make sure your keyword appears in the first 100 words
• Make sure your keyword shows up in the subheadings as well .
• Links: Check internal and also external links on your site. 404 errors can have a bad effect on the ranking of your site. When you check the links in your article you make sure that you don’t send your readers into nirvana.

Let’s go whole hog!

While you’re at it – things may have changed since your post was first published. This includes, for example, your design skills or your aesthetic sensibility. So before you republish your updated version of the post, take a look at the design – how happy are you with the image selection? What tricks could help you keep users on your site longer? Make an effort– because the effort pays off!

Back to the Future

Now you can also change the year in the title of your post – without a guilty conscience.

You’ve done the research, updated the post, and can now take advantage of Google’s content update boost, interrupting the downward spiral of your traffic. Congratulations! And by the way, constantly updating your posts not only helps you maintain your rankings – it allows you to keep track of which articles are getting clicks and in what state they are currently in.

Spread the word!

Now it’s up to you how much more wind you want to blow into the sails of your freshly updated post yourself. Post the article on your social media channels or inform your subscribers about the changes via newsletter.Last but not least, for the very impatient among you, there is also the option of manual indexing to reap the fruits of your labor faster. How exactly you can make sure that Google indexes your updated article, you can learn here .

For more tips, we still recommend you check out ahrefs’ post.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.