Pro Blogger's Guide to Updating Old Blog Posts for Big Traffic Gains - RankIQ

Orbit media’s latest blogging survey revealed that bloggers who update old posts get 270 percent more results than bloggers who do not update their old posts. Back in 2017, only 53 percent of bloggers updated at least one old post per year, and by 2021 that percentage had increased to 71 percent.

While more bloggers are updating their old posts, most of them do it the wrong way. This can lead to little-to-no traffic gains and, in some cases, major traffic losses.

In this guide, I will walk through some of the growth hacks I use to get significant traffic gains through strategically updating my old blog posts.

Here are the chapters of this guide.

Chapter 1: Why Old Posts Take Priority Over New Posts
Chapter 2: How I Increased my Organic Traffic by 50% in 4 Months Updating Old Posts
Chapter 3: Increasing Your Ad Income with Simple Blog Post Updates
Chapter 4: How to Strategically Add New Content to Increase Your Rankings
Chapter 5: Seven Common Questions about Updating Old Posts

Chapter 1

Why Old Posts Take Priority Over New Posts

You may be wondering – why does updating an old post that is already ranking take priority over writing a new post? There are a few excellent reasons to fix your old posts first.

1. It takes far less time since you’ve already completed the research and have existing edited content. The Orbit study I mentioned earlier found that almost 60 percent of bloggers spend between 3 and 6 hours on a new blog post. It takes just 30 to 60 minutes to update an old post.

2. You’ll get better returns. On average, an updated blog post will produce a bigger increase in traffic than a new blog post can produce on its own. Most blogs have posts ranking in the #8 to #10 spots on Google – but they can move up to the top 3 spots with a good update.

There is a massive difference in traffic between the #8 and #3 position on Google. The number 8 spot gets 3 percent of the clicks, and the #3 spot gets 18 percent. If you can move up from #8 to #3, that is a 600 percent increase in traffic.

Chart from Backlinko Study

3. Results happen much quicker. Instead of waiting months for a new post to work its way up in the rankings, an updated post with existing backlinks can move up the rankings in a matter of weeks.

These three reasons make it an open and shut case.

Chapter 2

How I Increased my Organic Traffic by 50% in 4 Months Just from Updating Old Posts

The year before last, I did a deep analysis to identify the posts on my blog that would stand to have the most significant traffic increase from an update. I cut back the amount of time I spent creating new posts and focused 80 percent of my time on updating 200 different blog posts.

It took four months to execute the plan and the results were off the chart:

Let me teach you the strategy I used.

The 4 Quadrant Approach

If you have read the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will recognize the four-quadrant approach. Old blog posts are grouped into four different categories; quadrant one is the most important, and quadrant four is the least important.

For a post to be classified as an old post, it must have been published at least 12 months ago. A newly published post needs about 12 months to get to its peak position in Google. You do not want to make any changes until this period is over.

Here’s a quick summary of the four quadrants to use for classifying and prioritizing old post updates.

Q1

Posts in this quadrant are experiencing organic content decay, have significant traffic, and rank #4 or lower (5, 6, 7, etc.). These are both important and require an urgent update.

Q2

This quadrant includes posts ranking #4 or lower (5, 6, 7, etc.) for the keyword producing the most organic clicks. They’ll also have received significant traffic over the last 12 months. These are not as important, nor as urgent, because they do not have content decay. However, they can produce some of the biggest traffic gains from an update.

Q3

Here, I put posts ranking #1, #2, or #3 for the keyword producing the most organic clicks and that have received significant traffic over the last 12 months. These posts can be fine-tuned for ad income by breaking up the larger paragraphs into smaller ones, but everything else should be left alone.

Q4

And finally, quad four includes posts with insignificant traffic. Any time spent on these will result in wasted resources amounting to very little to no traffic increases.

Here is a simple chart showing the four quadrants.

Resurrecting Q1

When a blog post has declining Google traffic over a period of 12 months, it is referred to as having organic content decay. Organic content decay happens when your posts decline in the Google rankings. The usual culprit is a new competitor that writes a post going a little deeper and broader than your post did.

Some less common scenarios are when a much higher domain authority site outranks you with a lower quality post, or a similar domain authority site gets more high-quality backlinks pointing to their post.

The posts with organic content decay are actively hemorrhaging; their rankings and traffic are suffering, and they are most in need of an update. Q1 posts are the highest priority, and you should update these posts first.

Leaky Bucket Syndrome

If you are not monitoring your existing higher traffic posts for content decay, it will eventually lead to leaky bucket syndrome. This is when a blogger focuses all their efforts on writing new posts while never paying any attention to the individual analytics of past blog posts.

Pro bloggers are even more susceptible to having a leaky bucket than newbie bloggers, as they are typically really good at choosing low-competition keywords to write posts on. Almost every post they write ranks and gets a good amount of traffic.

They look at their overall analytics, sure – but they rarely dig into the analytics of individual posts. After a year or two, these bloggers with the leaky bucket will begin to experience a plateau in their traffic; as fast as they get traffic from new blog posts, their old decaying posts lose just as much from the leaks.

How do you keep from becoming a victim of leaky bucket syndrome?

It starts by incorporating a quarterly content decay review process in Google Search Console. For the date range, you will compare the last 6 months to the previous 6-month period.

If you write seasonal content, then you will compare the traffic year over year. For example, a post about the best summer outfits for guys will compare the same time period from this summer to last summer.

After completing the process from the video above, you will have your Content Decay Sheet with a list of blog posts experiencing content decay. There is still one more step to identify which of these posts fall into quadrant 1 or quadrant 3. I will cover that shortly in another video walkthrough.

Tending to Q2

Quadrant two posts have significant traffic and are increasing their Google traffic or maintaining it. These posts have a ranking of #4 or lower (4, 5, 6, 7, etc.) in Google search for their top click-producing keyword phrase.

Here’s my simplified process for quickly identifying quadrant 2 and quadrant 3 blog posts via Google Console, which produces your Classification Sheet.

At this point, you have a complete list of every post on your blog that falls into quad 1, 2, or 3.

When to Update Q3

A quadrant 3 post is ranking #1, #2, or #3 for the keyword that produces the most clicks in Google Search Console. These posts can be fine-tuned for ad income by breaking up the larger paragraphs into smaller ones, but everything else should be left alone.

There are two scenarios where you should consider making content updates to a quadrant three post experiencing content decay.

1. If you have fallen from a #1 Google ranking to #3, and you are clearly being outranked by two posts with better content.

In this case, the writing is on the wall, and it is just a matter of time until you fall further in the rankings and this post moves from quadrant 3 to quadrant 1.

2. If you had a numbered list post in quadrant 3 that is losing traffic, and no longer has the highest leading number in the title on the first page of Google results.

For example, your post title is ‘10 Helpful Gardening Tips..’, and another post on the first page now has a title of ‘20 Gardening Tips..’.

In this situation, you would increase your gardening tips from 10 to 30, so that your post title will have the highest leading number.

Why Q3 Posts with Content Decay Don’t Fall into Q1

I have been asked several times about what to do with an old post that has a top 3 ranking and is losing traffic. Does it fall into quadrant 1 with the content decay posts? Or does it stay in quadrant 3 since it has a top 3 ranking?

If you have a post that has organic content decay and is also still ranked #1, #2, or #3 for the core keyword, I still treat it as a quadrant 3 blog post. The main reason why the best practice is to leave these alone is that they usually make up a big portion of a blog’s traffic.

For an established blogger where these posts make up 2 percent or less of overall traffic, the risk is much lower and there is more wiggle room to update these posts. Other less established blogs can have some quadrant 3 posts that makeup 5 percent or more of overall traffic. This increases the risk of major traffic loss with a single post making up a large percentage of the blog’s traffic.

Q4 is Left for Dead

Here’s the deal: you should not spend any time updating zero-traffic blog posts (aka, a post that has not received any Google traffic in the last 12 months). Almost all of these posts are lost causes.

These zero-traffic posts often target out-of-reach high competition keywords, or they are focused on commercial intent keywords where Google is not ranking informational blog posts on the first page.

Chapter 3

Increasing Your Ad Income with Simple Blog Post Updates

While we usually have to wait months before seeing more Google traffic from updating older posts, the impact on your ad income is immediate.

Two years ago, I individually optimized all of my high-traffic posts for maximum ad income. Most of the posts instantly saw ad income increases from 20 and 90 percent. This was one of my all-time greatest time investments in my blog, and it helped push my yearly ad income over 7 figures.

Break Up Your Paragraphs

Let’s start with how to break up your long paragraphs into shorter paragraphs. This can be applied to all blog posts in quadrants one, two, and three. Old blog posts that fall into quadrants one and two can be fully optimized for ad income. Posts in quadrant three will only have the longer paragraphs broken into shorter ones for ad optimization.

A big mistake that many bloggers make is to only review their posts on a computer.

Think about it – roughly 60 percent of all blog post visitors are using a mobile phone.

A post can look great on a computer and look awful on a smartphone. If you do not pull out your smartphone to read your post, you might end up having a poorly optimized post for 60 percent of your visitors.

This wall leads to a significant increase in visitors hitting the back button and decreasing the average time on page. The negative impact on your time on page can prevent you from achieving your highest possible ranking on Google.

Long paragraphs also hurt your blog’s ad income. Ad management companies like Mediavine and Adthrive use ad logic algorithms to determine how often and where they can place ads within a blog post.

The best practice is to have a maximum of three sentences in a paragraph. You should also alternate between two-sentence and three-sentence paragraphs with the occasional single-sentence paragraph.

By using this formula, you will get skimmers, and users with a short attention span, to go from checking out your post to reading it all the way through.

In addition, all these short paragraphs generate lots of white space. This creates the psychological effect that your blog is actually shorter than it is.

This is by far the easiest ad income optimization tactic to apply to old posts. It will also give you one of the biggest boosts in ad income.

Use Shorter Sentences

Plain and simple, long sentences are bad for user flow. A sentence in a blog post ideally should be no longer than 20 words.

There are a few easy ways to optimize your sentence length:

  1. Stop using semicolons and dashes.
  2. Think twice before using a comma to make a complex sentence.
  3. Read your blog post out loud and break up long sentences that are awkward to read.

Headings Instead of Bolded Text

Ad management companies like Mediavine use in-content logic. This means they will not insert an ad between a heading and a paragraph, making sure to never disrupt the flow of your content.

The best practice is to use H2 for your main headings and H3 for your subheadings.

Position Zero Snippet Optimization

By taking the time to optimize your headings and subheadings, you will also get your blog post to show up in position #0 for featured snippets. Position zero means that it shows up right before position #1.

Chapter 4

How to Strategically Add New Content to Increase Your Rankings

The safest path to updating old posts is to add more content to the tail end of the post, as it allows you to keep the original post and title intact.

So, how do you identify what content should be added to the tail end of a post?

Old School by Hand

The old-school way to cover a topic better than everyone else is to scan the headings, subheadings, and bolded text of each of the top 30 results on Google. These phrases will contain most key points covered in the posts on the first three pages of Google; you can simply copy and paste the key points of each heading into a Google sheet.

New School with AI

The new school way of finding your content gaps is by using an AI SEO tool like RankIQ, which can identify everything you need to cover in a split second.

Chapter 5

Seven Common Questions about Updating Old Posts

  1. Should I change my permalink when updating an old post?
  2. Why can’t I update posts that get zero traffic?
  3. Can I remove or replace images on old blog posts that get Google traffic?
  4. Do I need to update all blog posts that get Google traffic?
  5. Should I change the date to today’s date when I publish an update to an old blog post?
  6. Should I delete old posts that do not receive any traffic?
  7. How long after writing a new post should you consider updating?