Some blog posts are super star traffic generators and continue to deliver website visitors day after day throughout the year. Others can either slow down, or be ‘of their time’ with underperforming or outdated content. A blog refresh can turn these ‘old timers’ into superstar traffic generators once again.
Are your blog posts starting to underperform?
People don’t tend to want to consume out of date content. Those listicles of the ‘best cities to visit in 2019’ do not catch attention or clicks, and slip down the rankings very quickly. But posts with the current year in the blog post title do rather well. A study has been conducted by SearchPilot that demonstrated a 5% increase in organic traffic for a blog post which had the current year’s date in its title tag versus one that did not. Users and Search engines are interested in new content which attracts more clicks and longer engagement.
How to Refresh your Blog posts
Refreshing your blog post content isn’t as difficult as you think, hence why we have included it as a quick win. So let’s break it down into some easy steps:
Make sure your updated blog post is still relevant and reflects the current date
Scan through your content and make sure it’s actually still relevant and interesting to your audience. A traffic boost is no good if your audience engagement rate is low. Look out for broken external links and old images too.
Change the title date
Change the blog post to include the date in the SEO title. In most cases the current year is fine, but in some cases you might decide to use the month as well, future events might be the best example of this although I would consider if this is a time relevant blog post that perhaps it should be rewritten to be more evergreen.
Publish the blog post with a new date
Once the above changes are made, go ahead and republish the blog post with its new date. This isn’t updating the post, this is changing the metadata of the post to show it was published more recently. You can do this by either changing the publish date, or unpublishing the post and republishing it.
Pro tip: Reindex your blog post with Google
Don’t forget to republish the blog post with Google (and other search engines) using your search console account. Because the big pay off relies on search, and this is important to show search engines that your post has been refreshed. Simply use the URL inspection tool by pasting the URL of your blog post into the tool and request indexing.