Five Guidelines on How to Update Content 1 Year In

How do you update content 1 year after creating an amazing blog post? The post is filled with tons of fun and informative facts related to your organization and links to help you score high up on search results. People seem to like it quite a bit, too, judging by how much it’s getting shared around. At the risk of sounding too full of yourself, this one humble post might be an actual work of art.

Fast-forward about a year later. Are people still raving about your post? Probably not. You’ve likely moved on from it yourself. That’s just the natural lifecycle of internet content. But that doesn’t mean the things you wrote don’t still have value. In fact, going back over the blog again, it’s still probably one of your better articles, right? It would be a shame to see it languish down in the depths of your site when it still seems like such a valuable piece of content.

This is the general idea behind refreshing and reviving content. Essentially, it just means updating a piece of existing content to be relevant for the current time. There are tons of benefits to this strategy, the most obvious being as a means of saving time and effort by reusing an existing piece of content instead of making an entirely new one. But how do you go about refreshing a post? Lucky for you, it’s a fairly simple process, and here are five guidelines on how to update content one year later, which you can use to keep your posts relevant and working overtime.

1. Update Content Statistics

All you’ll really need to do for some posts is update content statistics that appear in the body. Having authoritative sources and good links in your post gives them a much greater sense of legitimacy and accuracy while also optimizing your SEO. Refreshing these stats is a simple thing to do and keeps your content useful and relevant to the people reading it.

It also requires minimal effort, as you can easily check where you got your original sources to see how things have changed in the year since you first wrote the post. You can even use this as an easy way to expand on your original commentary, looking back at your original conclusions and the trends you identified and judging how they stacked up to what happened afterward.

2. Change Up the Links

A big part of SEO strategy is using the best and most relevant links alongside your updated content. What worked last year may not be what works this year, though, so it’s important to go over the links you used in your original post to see if they’re worth changing. A big part of refreshing has to do with the content you don’t necessarily see, after all.

If you can find similar or even better links that are more relevant in the current search engine algorithms, it might be worth replacing some of the older links in your posts with those. This also means checking to see if your links even still work. Websites rise and fall in record time these days, meaning it’s not impossible that a key piece of research or great link from when the article was written just doesn’t exist anymore outside of archives. The same goes for pictures and images, too.

3. Check the Meta

Meta-tags are a crucial part of getting seen by the algorithm. Similar to updating links, updating your meta-tags on posts is a great way to keep them relevant. Ensuring both your title and description are still relevant and reflective of your updated content is a good place to start.

From there, check things like your keywords and meta-tags. If you’re not already doing it, look into current trends in SEO circles to see what’s popular at the moment and try to incorporate what you can into your refreshed keywords and tags. Incorporating more of each of these where possible isn’t a bad plan, either.

4. Repost, Repost, Repost

After you’ve finished the refreshing process on a piece of content, you’re going to need to repost it. Full reposts are obviously more likely to gain attention than just editing and updating an old article. You might even use it as an opportunity to create an annual update of a certain type of content. This keeps your readers informed on a topic while giving you an easily replenishable source of content each year that you can make with less effort.

Additionally, posting your new content elsewhere that you might not have in the past is a good way to give your refreshed blogs greater exposure. Before you start though, be sure to consider the various pros and cons of doing this in terms of the algorithm. For instance, if you didn’t start out using certain social media accounts, this is the perfect place to put some links to your content. You might even reach out to people who linked to the old version of your content to inform them that you’ve updated, giving both of you a chance to refresh and repost content symbiotically.

5. See What the Competition Has to Say

Chances are there have been people before and after who have made blog posts similar to what you did. Some of them might have even been inspired by your original. In that sense, it’s good to see what competitors are saying on the subject you’re attempting to refresh, as this is a good way to expand on and improve your content before publishing.

Understanding new perspectives and learning new facts about a situation keep your content more relevant and engaging, which will keep your whole brand relevant and engaging. If you’re looking to go a step further than just a refresh, too, ‘skyscraping’ a competitor’s article and combining it with elements of your old content can be a great way to make a better blog post with less work.

Refreshing content is an essential part of keeping your workload low and website relevant in the search engine. Try out these five guidelines to update content after a year of publishing, and don’t be afraid to reach out to previsible.io for help on optimizing your SEO.