When someone regularly adds new content to their sites, they face an inevitable question: What happens to my older articles?

The way blogging works is really unfair to your past work: It gets buried in archives, losing traffic and relevance.

Is there a way to keep your content always up-to-date? Yes, but first let’s discuss the why.

Why update your content?

Keeping your content fresh and updated is more than overcoming the unfairness of your past work fading away. It’s actually a legit marketing tactic that saves money and makes your users’ on-site experience smoother.

So let’s dive into why updating old content is so important:

1. User experience

The most obvious reason is that you want each of your site pages to be an effective entry landing page: Outdated content and to article updates. For example, if you update your blog daily, allocate every Friday to an article update.

Make sure your updated content is promoted as new: Create social media updates to push it using all available channels and diverse messaging. I use Creatopy for that because it makes this process extremely productive by allowing content writers and promoters to collaborate on visual creatives.

It should be noted that updating your site is not just about SEO and clicks. Many of your static pages that are not necessarily created to attract organic traffic are often left outdated. These include About us page, TOS, privacy policy page, FAQ page, and more. Keep those updated as well, based on your company’s milestones and legislation changes.

Takeaways

Keeping your existing content updated helps your user experience and SEO by letting you benefit from the past effort and already acquired link equity. Fresher content likely attracts higher click-through thanks to dated search snippets.

To identify content that needs updating, assess your losses in rankings and traffic. It’s also a good idea to update well-linked content that has never ranked, for any reason.

Republishing an old article to a new date without updating it’s against Google’s guidelines. Adding significant information – like new sources, tools, stats, images and videos — lets you republish old articles and push them on top of your archives, increasing their chances to rank higher and attract more clicks.

And finally, to make sure your content updates are really effective, make them part of your content marketing routine.