Everyone says that you should update your blog entries. How do we do that exactly? This post will breakdown the key elements when you need to update your blog posts.

To update or not to update?

Let’s start with question, “What should you update?” Before you start with the actual updating, first, you need to scan all your existing posts. Start with the obvious ones. The most popular posts on your website are probably written eons ago.

If your blog does have a steady influx of traffic, then, view all your top pages, and arrange them by date. By the way, it’s a terrible idea to add dates in the URLs.

How to decide? How many blogs to update?

There’s no exact number here. It really depends on your new resources. If you think you have other posts to link, then, of course, you could add a lot of information. Roughly, here are the things you should be doing before updating:

• Know ‘the time to update’ versus ‘the estimated value.’
  • Let’s say a post would have 1,500 monthly visitors and there would be a 20% increase of visits once the update is done. Thus, you would have an additional 300 monthly visitors for that page.
  • Is this enough for you? Only you can answer whether an additional 300 visitors would mean a lot or not.
  • Assess other means as well. If you decide to do a paid advertisement, would it be better? How much will it cost you?
  • For the most part, when companies reach over 10,000 monthly visitors, any increase of web traffic is always worth the blood, sweat, and tears.
• Know the estimated number of views.
  • Use web traffic estimates and look at it as if you are publishing a new content. If a new post would generate 800 – 1200 monthly reads, then, use that range as your basis when you update a blog post. If you think you can get the same amount of reads when you update, then, go for it.
• Test it first.
  • Like any project, you would test it first if it is indeed effective. Start updating a few pages, 5 – 15 posts for example, and see how it goes. Then, measure the improvements in a span of at least 90 days. If it goes well, you might want to apply the same changes to your other blog posts.

Learn the drawbacks of updating your old posts.

Now that you figured out what are the pages fit for update and revision, the next step is to know the possible dangers when you are trying to update your content:

• You are changing the focus.
  • When you make changes, there’s a huge change that you would derail from the main focus of the original article. If you derail too much, then, it would affect the existing focus and rankings.
• You are changing the anchor texts that are relevant to the page.
  • The original article may have internal or external links to boost link building effort. If you try to edit, you may change a particular term that are needed. Thus, there’s a chance that you may devalue previously used anchor texts. You may lose traffic along the way.
• You want to stay fresh.
  • See, if your website focuses on well-established topics, there’s no need to stay fresh. You only need to update if topics constantly change. For example, if you talk about grammar and composition, there are NOT a lot of changes in terms of the English grammar. So, updating it is unnecessary.

Ready to start the updating? Refer to this list of tips!