The internet has come a long way since its inception in the ‘80s. It has become the central hub of information and socialization for the current generation, all the search activities of billions of users every day are handled by search engines, which aim to make the job of finding information about anything on a topic a user is searching for.
Naturally, search engines have evolved and become advanced enough to parse through and decide which content best matches the user’s intentions. If you own a website and had reasonably good content when you started out but are no longer seeing enough traffic, outdated content may be the culprit.
Here are five good reasons why you should constantly update your blog content.
Refresh Your Content for Google
The most commonly used search engine in the world, which beats even its closest competitor out of the waters, is Google. With about 8.5 billion daily searches on the engine on average, ranking on the top page of Google is the Holy Grail for most business and website owners. And to do that, refreshing your content is a must.
Let’s say you’ve written a very detailed article on wood carving a few years back when there wasn’t much competition in the niche, and the article ranked on the top page of Google when anyone searched the basics of wood carving.
But if, since then, a dozen other articles on the topic have come out and have more relevant details than your article, it will quickly fall behind. You can sustain your search rank by refreshing it every year or so and adding new information to the base article.
Amend Overlooked Mistakes and Improve Accuracy
Most bloggers out there like to write their content and edit it themselves. But a common problem caused by this practice is that it’s easy to overlook mistakes and flaws in your writing style. When you proofread and refresh your old content after some time, it’s easy to spot those flaws and correct them, improving the core quality of the content.
Suppose you run an eCommerce blog and want unlinked brand mentions that you didn’t previously incorporate in your content. In that case, you can also hire an agency specializing in content creation to improve the quality of your current website content.
Update Your Links and Resources
Another good reason to update an old blog post is to add links and resources to validate the accuracy of the information in the content. This has become especially important in recent years as Google has started leaning more and more on authoritative sources as one of their most important search ranking factors for websites.
So if your blog post has data and statistics, to keep it relevant, you need to add the official links from authorities bodies like WHO, CDC, UN, and other national or international agencies backing them up. Otherwise, your content will lag behind in search results due to a lack of detectable validation factors by Google’s search crawler.
Increase Your Click-Through Rate
One of the biggest benefits of updating a blog is that it leads to a higher click-through rate than any website owner wants. If your content has a better click-through rate, then there’s a better chance to land in the top results of a Google search. Google usually prioritizes recently published content when ranking. Refreshing your content and republishing it helps maintain this parameter.
This is because users are more likely to click on recently published articles. If you’re an eCommerce or SAAS site, your blog content should stay relevant to ensure better click-through rates. A lot of bloggers don’t have good call-to-action (CTA) in their content the first time around; refreshing the blog content can be an excellent opportunity to do so at a later time.
Keeping Your Content Alive and Performing Well
The final reason to keep refreshing your content is to let your audience or customer base know that you care enough. Most websites don’t bother updating their blogs for years at a time, which can slow the traffic down. By refreshing your old blog content, you are keeping your website relevant and ensuring it’s performing well.
Keeping At It
Refreshing old blog content might seem like a chore, but you need to constantly do it to stay at the top of your niche or industry. As long as you follow the basics of content refreshing, you won’t have too much of a hard time. And if you can’t make time to do what’s necessary, hire someone to help you out.
