The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 120. Update Old Content to Grow Your Blog

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Welcome back to another episode of The Ultimate Blog Podcast! It’s a solo episode today with me, Jennifer, and I am sharing more about updating old blog content with you on this episode. I advise you to develop a strategy for routinely assessing and enhancing your posts. I stress the importance of content quality, user experience, and competitiveness in search rankings. I also discuss practical aspects of content updating, such as using plugins for revision and doing minor tweaks versus major overhauls. This short episode was packed full of valuable content that you aren’t going to want to miss!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsGet 20% off of Keysearch Starter Plan using this link and code: KSDISCCheck out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode120

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Hey there, I'm Jennifer. Welcome back to another episode of the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today we are going to be doing a solo episode and this one is going to be short and sweet. I want to talk to you today about updating old content on your blog. And this kind of falls in line with just keeping your blog in good shape. The reason we want to talk to you about this is you're probably used to hearing people say things like blogging is passive, you can make passive income. And in so many ways, that is true. You create a blog post. And if you're monetized, your blog can earn income for years to come on that one blog post. But in order for blogging to work for you in the long run, and to be beneficial, you can't just post it and forget it. You can't just create a blog post, publish it and never look at it again.

If you want to make sure you're driving optimum traffic to your site, it's important to make sure that your blog is always in good shape. And that could include all the things, you know, the technical things that come along with blogging. But the piece that I want to talk about today is keeping your content in good shape. So whether you've been blogging for a long time, or if you're new to blogging, it's important to know that you need to have a strategy so that you're reviewing every blog post you publish on a regular basis and making sure it's performing the way you want it to. And if not, that you are updating that content or determining what you need to do with that content. Because there's several different

reasons. But if you have content that's not performing well on your site, A, you couldn't be doing better and bringing you some traffic, you have some missed opportunity there. And B, it could potentially be dragging your overall site health down and making you lose traffic to other posts that could potentially be doing really well. So that's what we're going to talk about this today. We're going to talk about creating a strategy so that you can review your content on a regular basis and make sure that every post you have out there is performing as optimally as it possibly can. So when it comes to thinking about how you're going to spend your time on blog posts, yes, a significant part of it will be on creating new content. But you need to set aside a chunk of time for reviewing already published content and updating it as needed.

There is so much benefit to that, and we're going to go through all of that. Now, a couple of things I want you to listen to. episode number 50. That one is going to be really helpful to you as we talk about how to, you know, actually perform some of the steps to figure out what content you want to update. And then another episode that would be really helpful for you to listen to is episode number 87 with Aleka Shunk. She talks about the secret to keyword research success. And she's going to give you some tips in that episode about how long you should wait before you review your content, and how to find keywords and just all of those best practices that you should have in place when it comes to creating content. So those would be two really

helpful episodes to go online with this one to make sure that your content is always in the best shape it can possibly be for your blog. So first and foremost, let's talk about creating a strategy and a system so that you're reviewing your posts on a regular basis. This can be whatever works for you. The simplest thing would be to create a spreadsheet. And every time you publish a post, you just want to put the key information on there, like the URL, the name of the post. Most importantly, you want to put the keywords that you were targeting when you wrote that post and the date that it was published. And that way, whether you choose like a six month timeline or a 12 month timeline, whatever is going to be best for you to review that content, you have a list where you can keep track of exactly what you need to do and when you need to

do it. And then when that time period rolls around, what you need to do is utilize all of the resources that you have to review the traffic, whether you're looking at Google Analytics, you're looking at a keyword research tool, or you're looking at Google Console, you need to review the traffic that's coming to that post from the various sources. And make sure you add that to your spreadsheet. So you're looking to see, am I getting Google traffic? Am I getting any traffic from Pinterest? Am I getting any social media traffic on this post? What does it look like? Has it been growing? Did I get a lot of traffic and now it's falling? Those are things you want to look at first. You want to look at

the overall traffic and where it's coming from and what it looks like month to month. And then a few other things you want to look for are, are you ranking for this post? So is it ranking in Google? And there's different ways you can look at that. You can look in your Google console, or you can use something like KeySearch or another tool to help you see what keywords you're ranking for, if any, for that post. And if you are ranking, what position are you ranking for? Are you ranking in the top three, which is where we really want you to be? Are you ranking at least on page one? Or are you page two? Or are you not ranking at all? The other thing you can start to look at is, are you ranking for other keywords? So maybe you wrote

this post for a specific set of keywords, and you're actually ranking for a different keyword phrase that's similar, but wasn't what you were expecting. It's important to know that as well, as you go through and start to analyze your post. Then you also, like I said, you want to look and see like, are you getting traffic from Pinterest? Is this performing well in Pinterest? That's going to give you some information. And then look and see, does your post have any backlinks? So that means, has anybody else on the internet linked to my post? That's important to know too, because backlinks can help give your post authority. So if it's ranking well, you're ranking number one, two, three on Google, you're getting traffic, you're getting Pinterest traffic, then hey, you looked at it, you want to note those things. And you just want to keep monitoring that post, I wouldn't make

a bunch of changes to it. But if it's not, then we need to start looking further. Is it ranking at all? Where's it ranking? Is it on the second page? So we are close to ranking highly for it where we can get some traffic? Or is it not ranking at all? And that's going to help you prioritize maybe which posts you want to work on updating first. If it's close, you might want it has a lot of potential, you might want to go ahead and update that post before another one, so that you can start getting a surge of traffic on that post. So then at this point, like when you have all this information, you have your list of posts that you know probably need to be updated. Then the next question is, okay, well, what do I do now? with kind of an objective eye. Did I really meet the user intent with my post, it's easy to get caught up in the details, and not look at the bigger picture and make sure that your post is

actually solving a problem for someone. So look at it objectively and see if it really meets the user intent for the set of keywords that you have. And then I would also go out and look at the post for your keywords that you're targeting and see, like, how do I compare with those? Am I including as much information? Is my post really better? Or is it lacking in some way? Can I see that what people are looking for with those keywords is something different than what I actually shared? And I need to understand that so that I can improve my content. actually shared. And I need to understand that so that I can improve my content. So you're really just looking for are there ways I can improve the content. Maybe you've learned more, maybe you know something more than you did when you wrote the post. Maybe you can see it a little more objectively and you can go in and truly improve the content. Maybe it's simple things like you need to add more links to other internal posts or you need to link from other posts to this post. There are different things that you can do. And if you go back and listen to that auditing your own website podcast episode, you can dig in to a little bit more of that. But the idea is really that it's time to start thinking about how can I make a post that is the best possible version of this post. And that way,

I have a better chance of meeting people's needs and getting traffic to this post. And it improves the overall quality of my website. So once you've been blogging for six months to a year and longer, this should be a regular practice that you have. A certain percentage of your time you want to set aside and just simply work on updating and redoing old content. Because think about the benefit. It's already there. It's already hopefully at least ranking for some keywords. It already has some juice, so to speak. So let's get this post fixed up and it's the best it can possibly be and republish that so that people will see it and people can find it. Implementing keyword research and competition analysis into your content strategy is a surefire

way to improve your chances of people finding your content and we love how simple key search makes it to find keywords we actually want to use in our posts key search is a powerful keyword research tool that makes finding relevant low competition keywords for your blog simple and easy if you think optimizing your blog and doing keyword research has to be hard, think again. Give this powerhouse tool a try and see how much easier it will be to create content for your blog. Not only is it reasonably priced, even for beginning bloggers, but you can use our code for 20% off your subscription. Click the link in our show notes to learn more.

in our show notes to learn more. And so at this point, you have a few options when it comes to what you're going to do with that content. And what we've been talking about is rewriting and republishing the post. That is probably your number one option. In most cases, you want to take that post that's not performing optimally, you want to fix anything and everything you possibly can to make it better. Sometimes that could mean wiping out the whole post and completely redoing it. Sometimes it means adding different sections. Sometimes it means reformatting. Sometimes it means adding new photos. There's so many things you can do to make your post as best as it can possibly be. So that is option number one. Option number two is if it's doing reasonably well, you could always track it for a little while longer to see how it's doing, see if it improves or starts to decline, and then you can revisit. And in a very rare

circumstance, you might want to delete the post. If you realize you just made a huge mistake, it's never going to rank. It's not adding value to your readers and you're never going to do anything with that post. Sometimes you might just want to delete it. But for the most part, you're going to want to rework and republish the post. So let's talk about how to do that. There's a couple different options. You could literally just go into the post, to do that. There's a couple different options. You could literally just go into the post, make all the changes that you want to make, update the date in WordPress and hit publish or update. And that will replace the old post. But like most of us, you probably have a process for creating blog posts. And it's not that quick and simple. So if you want to leave the old post in place,

and be able to work on the new post over time, then you can use a plugin. There's plugins that you can use for WordPress. And there's different versions. The one we use right now is called Revision Manager, TMC. There's other ones available as well. So you would use this plugin, and it would create a copy of the post for you. That way your original post stays live. You can work in a draft of the new post. So you can delete, add, change, update, do anything you want. And you can either then republish that post or schedule it for a later date to republish. And what happens is it will overwrite your original post once that post goes live. So

that's a really great way to work on a strategy of updating old content without feeling like you have to get it all done in one sitting and worry about losing any of your work. So that's what we'd recommend. And one question that we get a lot when it comes to updating content is, do I publish it with a new date? Or do I just update it? And here's how you're going to distinguish. If you go into a post, just because there was a typo, or you needed to add one sentence, or just something small was missing, then what you would do is you would just update that post, and you'd have the original publish date. And then in your would do is you would just update that post and you'd have the original published date. And then in your WordPress settings, you can add a, another date that says last updated, and that would be the current date. So it has both of those dates on there for you.

So people can see that, yes, you did update something, but it was originally published, whatever your original published date was. And so you would only do just that update with the original date if it was just something really small. But if you're truly updating your old content, you're going to start over, so to speak, and you're going to have a new published date of the current date. And yes, this is okay because it's going to go back out to your email list. Potentially it's going to be pushed to the top of your blog. People are going to see it and that's okay because most likely they're not going to remember it from the first time around a year ago or six months ago. And even if they are, they're not really judging you for it. They are excited to get something that they

enjoyed before in an updated format. So at this point, once you've updated this content, you've republished it, then the timeline just starts over again. You're going to put that back on the list and you're going to review that again and make sure that it's doing what you wanted it to do. It's ranking for the keywords that you wanted it to rank for and getting traffic from the different sources you were hoping it would. And that's just a really important piece of maintaining your blog. So you're going to continuously review your data. It's so important to know, like, how are you performing? Because if not, you're going to be throwing spaghetti noodles at the wall. And you're never really going to know what's resonating. By going through this process, A, you're going to improve the overall quality of your content

in your website. And B, you're going to have a really good idea of what content performs well, what things your audience likes, so that as you are creating new content, you're able to know what works and what doesn't so that you can create the kind of content that people want. what works and what doesn't so that you can create the kind of content that people want. So overall, it's a win-win. So this is why we think it's so important for you to continuously update old content on your website because it's just going to benefit you in the long run and it's going to help you grow your blog, your traffic, your website, and your income. So we hope this was helpful. And as always, if you have any questions, we'd love for you to reach out to us and we are happy to get back to you and figure out what way we can help you best. Thanks so much for listening.

Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.