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Your blog content should be timely and relevant.
You’ve probably heard that before. But what do you do when the timeliness of your content fades? You will need to update and repost your blog content to keep it current.
This can take up a lot of time and resources, so it’s important to know how often you should repost blog content. Once you figure that out, you can balance it with creating new content.
Updating and reposting blog content refers to refreshing content you’ve already published. This can include adding new facts, updating links to external content and to other posts on your site, optimizing other on-page SEO factors that need tweaking, updating the image, adding or removing sections, and so on.
Elements like these rarely need to be updated more frequently than once a year. If you update each article more frequently, you risk overinvesting in updates and underinvesting in new content. To compound the problem, you will have more content to update as your blog grows.
How can you know how much time to invest in keeping your older content updated?
If you’re just getting started and have relatively few blog posts, you will want to focus on creating content rather than updating it. This may mean that you focus entirely on creating content for your first year or two.
Then, after you have accumulated many posts, you will want to build in regular allowances for updating and reposting blog content.
Like with so many things, the 80/20 rule can provide a good rule of thumb. There are a couple of different ways you can use it to plan your content updates.
You can plan to allocate 80% of your content creation schedule to adding new content and 20% to updating and reposting existing blog content. This means for every four new blog posts you publish, you update one existing post, for example.
You can also use the 80/20 rule to determine which content to repost to your blog. Nathan Bracy of Revenue River advocates updating the 20% of your blog posts that bring in 80% of your traffic numbers. You could plan to do this in bulk once a year or schedule refreshes throughout your content calendar.
Most content marketers can make do with updating content annually. But there are some situations where it makes sense to refresh your content more frequently.
Let’s say a major event or shift is unfurling quickly in your industry, and you want to be seen as the go-to source where people can learn about it. The page or blog posts where you publish that information should be as up to date as possible to support your position as an authority. Depending on the event, this may mean updating your content weekly or even daily.
When you’re blogging regularly, you’re bound to make a typo here and there. But sometimes poor grammar and other mistakes made their way into your older content more frequently than you’d like. Perhaps your older content lacked substance, and you suspect that low quality is harming your search visibility for the entire site. If you’ve got a lot of poorly written content that needs to be upgraded, you’ll want to plan more time towards updating and reposting it.
When you publish new content, it’s important to link to it from older content. Whenever you add a new blog post, repost your older content on the same topic with links to the new post added. This helps readers better discover all your related material, and it improves your internal linking structure for search engines. This won’t take a lot of time, but it does mean you will be reposting older blog content more frequently.
It’s common to have a couple of standout blog posts perform far better than others. Perhaps they’re responsible for bringing in most of your organic traffic. Or they play a big role in your marketing funnel because prospects tend to read them before signing up for a free trial. Prioritize updating this content before all other blog posts, because you are likely to see the greatest impact from your work.
Consistently providing good blog content can take up a lot of your valuable time. Reach out and let SaaSpirin take care of it—it’s what we do!