One of the best things you can do for your website is to give your old posts and articles some love by updating them. Called Content Maintenance, it is far easier to do this maintenance than it is to write brand new posts. Faster too.
Making a content maintenance plan.
First, find your most popular older posts. You can use your Google Analytics for this.
Make sure you update these posts first. They may already have a following with links to it from other websites. Updating the content in your posts will help raise their ranking in search engine results pages and help get your website and business noticed.
Second, check those posts to see if they are still relevant to your business or industry.
If it is no longer relevant, you might not want to keep the post on your site anymore. But if you can update the old content and make the information fresh for the visitors again do so.
Third, don’t update all of your posts at once. Just do a few at a time. This way you can space out promoting them to your email lists and followers getting more mileage out of your content maintenance plan.
What should you update in your old posts?
- Update the content with new information. Old and out-of-date information can be taken out.
- Make your content readable. Use short paragraphs and add subheadings and bulleted lists to break up the copy.
- Remove dates on your posts or in your URLs. If Google sees an old date on a website post it might not rank it because it is old content. If you like having dates on your content, change the information to use “Last Updated…” so visitors know this is fresh information.
- Remove or update outdated references and facts. Like old technical information that has since advanced.
- Change the graphics or photos. See if the current graphics still relate to the post's topic.
- Screenshots from other websites or software applications. Make sure you show the latest versions.
- Make your post longer if it makes sense. Make sure the information you are adding is usable to your visitor and not being written for a search engine.
- Check your outbound links. Make sure your links to other websites or articles in your post are still good.
- Check your posts keyword phrase. Does it still work for your post? See if you can rework the content to expand on that phrase.
- Double check the meta tag and meta description. Make sure the text is engaging to visitors on search engine results pages.
- Add links to your internal pages and newer posts. Take the time to link keyword phrases from your newly revised post’s content where it makes sense.
If you are not sure how to update your website’s posts, contact your website's webmaster for help.
How does website content maintenance benefit you?
- Reworking an old post is faster than writing a brand new post.
- Visitors and clients will appreciate you keeping your information up-to-date. You become a go-to source.
- You could get a ranking boost to your website in the search engines.
- Updating your old posts will make search engines consider them new content and maybe rank higher.
- You can promote your revised posts on social media or to your email lists just like you would a new post.
In Conclusion
Keeping your content fresh will keep your website fresh. This is part of a good website marketing strategy and an easy one to keep up with. The hard work is already done - the content is all there in the post. Just think of this as a revision to make your posts even better.
You want people to come to your website to be informed. Keeping your posts up-to-date with the times will help your visitors, and maybe even your bottom line.