How to Update Your Existing Blog Posts Like a Pro

If you are running a blog for a while with a consistent post publishing schedule of 3 new posts or, more a week, your blog has accumulated at least 156 Posts a Year.

Now, it is next to impossible for any blogger to keep all of these posts relevant and useful for the readers without updating or, refreshing them.

This is exactly why you need to update all or, most of your existing blog posts once in a while.

After all, helping others by sharing useful information is the prime goal of any honest blog (I call them “Ethical Blog”).

Is not it?

So, now let me show you some of the other benefits of updating the old blog posts consistently.

Top Benefits of Updating the Existing Blog Posts:

You can be benefited from your updated blog posts in multiple ways.

However, to keep things short and sweet, I have listed the top 3 benefits below:

1. Everybody Loves Fresh Contents:

Everybody (including search engines) loves fresh and useful contents. Fresh and updated contents are so valuable that all web search engines have rolled out their official algorithm updates (such as “Panda” by Google) to penalize the old and useless contents as well as to reward the fresh and up to date contents by giving them significant boosts in overall ranking.

So, it is a MUST to keep your blog filled with fresh and valuable contents in order to keep your blog live and growing.

2. Authority (and Branding Boost):

Since you are going to add more and more value to your existing blog posts every time you update them, your existing readers start loving your blog in no time.

And they will happily share your blog posts with their beloved ones, which will help you to find new readers for your blog (or, brand) quickly.

As a result, your overall authority (as a blogger) will be increased significantly while your blog (as a brand) will be more reputed one.

3. More Leads, More Sales and More Revenue:

If done right, updating your old blog posts will surely help you to acquire more leads, get more sales and make more money while keeping your efforts minimum.

For example, as you get more readers from your updated blog posts, it is most likely that you will be getting more subscribers in your E-Mail List and more followers throughout your social media accounts.

And we all know very well that more leads means more sales and more revenue.

So far, we have discussed a few benefits of updating the old blog posts once in a while.

Now, let me show you how to update your existing blog posts like a pro.

Before going straight to the point, let me show you a shortcut that will help you to decide which posts you need to update (and which one to delete or, re-purpose).

How to Decide Which Posts to Update, Re-Purpose or, Delete:

Follow the simple guidelines given below to decide which posts you need to Update, Re-Purpose or, Delete.

Update:

Update the posts that are useful but not ever green. For example, if you have ever published a List of Officially Recommended WordPress Hosting Service Providers that has been changed a lot after publishing your post, you may want to update it with accurate information.

Re-Purpose:

You may want to re-purpose your ever-green posts only. For example, if you have ever published a post on how to improve UX of a blog or, website, you should re-purpose it.

Delete:

You should delete all those posts which are neither useful nor ever-green. For example, you blog does not need a Guide on Microsoft Windows 95 (except you are legally bound to do so). So you can safely delete it and keep your blog filled with fresh content.

Now, once you have selected the posts that require an update, go through the following steps.

Step-1: Keyword Update:

First thing first. First you have to check if your existing post is properly keyword optimized or, not. Generally, you want to add a few new and good focus keywords and some LSI Keywords to your post in this step.

Pro-Tip: Try to put some of your new keywords within “H” tags for better On-Page SEO Score.

Step-2: Title, URL and Meta-Description Update:

In this step, you need to update and optimize your Title, URL and Meta Description for your post. This is important. In other words, you need to be nearly perfect in optimizing your blog post in accordance with your selected keywords.

Step-3: Content Update:

This is huge.

Content updates cover almost everything related to the body of your blog post. So this is very much important. Content updates cover the following:

Text Update:

In this section, you need to update any new information, data, link and spelling (if required). Generally, professional bloggers try to add lead magnets, rectify any spelling and grammatical errors, replace all broken links, add more high quality links (internal and external), add more data backed information and make any editorial changes they might need to keep their blog useful and highly relevant to its niche.

Multimedia Update:

In this step you need to check the relevancy of the multimedia contents present in your blog. You may want to add proper Alt. tags to images, compress images and make your multimedia content SEO ready by adding proper titles, meta-descriptions, tags, etc.

Social Media Update:

In this step, you may want to update your social media accounts with accurate and better contents. For example, you may want to change your description, image/video, hashtag or, caption for the updated posts on social media.

Technical Update:

Once you cover all the steps given above, you need to focus on the technical updates. The technical updates cover the following:

Functionality Checkup: Check if everything is working properly or, not. Fix the issue if needed.
SEO Checkup: Check SEO techniques are working on your blog or, not.
Display/UX Checkup: Check if you can make your existing Display/UX better or, not.

Basically these are the steps of updating your blog posts like a pro.

What’s Next:

Go through each and every link carefully to make your mission for updating the old posts successful.

Hope these links will help you a lot.

Conclusion:

Updating your blog posts might be a tedious task for you right now.

But it won’t be the same when you will learn how to update your existing blog posts like Pro.

And trust me, it will well worth your efforts.

So take action, make a well researched schedule for updating your blog posts and start updating your blog post right away.

Finally,

1. Share this post with your friends – it takes a few seconds only.

2. Please let me know what do you think about it by leaving a quick comment in the comment section below.

I reply each and every comment, personally.

Enough for today.

See you in the next post.

Let’s blog ethically.

If you want to write for us, check out our Write for Us section for details.

Author
Recent Posts

Subhabrata Kasyapi

Editor-in-Chief at Ethical Blogging

Subhabrata Kasyapi is the Founder of Ethical Blogging. He writes about Blogging, SEO and Advanced Content Marketing Strategies.

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How to Update Your Existing Blog Posts Like a Pro (Even If You Are A Newbie)