Here’s How To Get the Most Value Out Of Your Old Blogs

by Matthew Smith Writer

As they say, “content is king” and one of the best strategies to emerge in recent years is to drive your content through the blogosphere. But gone are the days when businesses used to prioritize quantity over quality, a time when keyword stuffing was more important than reader interest. With each successive Google algorithm update, people and enterprises are quickly learning that there is a better way to do things.

However, your old badly-written, poorly-researched blog posts from the year 2006 are still lurking in the shadows and may be the reason for your blog’s failing performance.

What’s the Problem with Old Blogs?

As mentioned before, blog writers used to put a lot of focus on spinning out 10 new blog posts every day. Not only does this make it especially hard to keep track of your entire blog inventory, but it also reduces the crawl efficiency of your blog.

Consider this: If you have about 1,500 blog posts, out of which only about 200 are of good quality, Google’s crawl bots will certainly remember that and will visit your blog more infrequently in the future.

However, if you prune down your blogs, your readers will be able to find relevant and engaging content more conveniently. High-value blogs will also ensure the crawl bots spend more time on your site.

Assess Your Blog Inventory

The first thing you should do is get a list of all the URLs in your blog. This is a simple process that can be done by exporting your database field, evaluating your sitemap or getting data from Google Analytics and Webmaster.

Once you have the links to all your blog post, it is time to seperate the good content from the bad.

The Good and The Bad Content

Good content is well-written, informative, entertaining and interesting. It could be anything from a fun listicle to a walkthrough guide. Good quality will drive up your traffic, boost your organic rankings and improve ROI. It will also help your brand establish an identity or even build its authority on certain topics.

Any post that is plagiarized, stuffed with keywords, has duplicate content, copyright issues, poor research, broken links or any number of issues is harmful content and should not be kept on the site. If the reader clicks on this content, they should be redirected to a better page on your site, until you figure out how to update your entire blog.

Additionally, if you have content that is not related to your brand’s message, you should think twice about holding on to it.

How to Add Value To Existing Blog Posts

When reading through your old blog posts, you will find that some content which you initially rejected actually has good bones. You can start by improving those by fixing the grammar and writing. Also, ensure that the blog points to a certain message associated with your brand.

Another great strategy that you can employ is to repurpose your old blogs and update them with fresh, relevant information. You can do this by adding new data and incorporating fresh opinions and developments into the blog. HubSpot says that blog writers who did this experienced 74% more positive results in the aftermath.

You can also integrate images, infographics, video, and other “snackable” multi-media into your content to drive up engagement and improve user experience.

Some of the most overlooked elements by blog writers pertain to technical improvements like meta descriptions, line breaks, relevant interlinking, and image optimization. All of these should be updated and improved as well.

How Do You Know Your Updated Blogs Are Performing Well?

Once your blogs are updated and published, keep an eye on them to check their performance. One of the most significant indicators of a successful blog is the organic traffic that is generated. You can check out your organic traffic sessions through Google Analytics.

If you succeed in getting enough organic traffic, the next indicator may be your improved Google rankings.

Just remember that it may take the search engine a few months to make sense of your updated content. Until then, be patient and keep blogging. But if you find all of this too daunting, get help from a blog writing service that will do the job for you!