What is Historic Blog Optimisation?

Blog articles are one of the best long-term marketing investments you can make for your business. Each one weighs in as a separate page of your website in terms of domain authority and can drive search traffic for years or even decades. Our own writing team can attest to this. For some customers, many of the top-ranking sources in search results during research are articles we’ve written in the past, and one of our writers recently stumbled across a blog he had written in 2002 – still indexed and presumably drawing search traffic.

Evergreen Digital Assets

This is why blogs are described as ‘evergreen’ digital assets, capable of generating value for your business over and over again. Some blog articles deal with current affairs or news updates – and these date quite quickly – and others are created as long-term resources, designed to stand the test of time. However, not even evergreen blogs retain their relevance indefinitely. Information becomes out of date, predictions fail to materialise, and industry terminology, norms, and regulations evolve.

What About When There Are Content Changes?

One response, of course, is to write new blog articles. These can self-consciously link back to older blogs and discuss how and why things have changed since they were first written.

Another response is to optimise your historic blogs, updating them to include relevant and accurate information without changing the fundamental structure of the original article.

We are not suggesting that you retrospectively change your ‘10 IT predictions for 2006’ article to come across as uncannily prescient (!), but historic blog optimisation is a useful way of keeping your digital assets relevant if and when regulations change in your sector or new technologies change the business landscape. You can also update your blogs when your own knowledge and experience changes so that the blog provides more detail and value for your readers.

SEO For Historic Blogs

Another reason to optimise your historic blogs is if they lose search position. Normally, when a webpage or article loses rank, it’s because it has become superseded in search relevance by newer content. If this is the case, it could be worth looking at other blogs that now rank highly for those keywords and seeing what they have that your original blog doesn’t. Maybe your blog no longer addresses the customer pain points in the way it used to, and needs to be upgraded accordingly.

It also could be due to your customers using different search terms and phrases. In this case, your historic blogs could be optimised by the inclusion of newer and more relevant keywords to regain their search prominence.

Other Ways To Optimise Historic Blogs

Finally, older blogs can always be optimised to improve the reader experience, for example by improving the structure of the article to make it more engaging, adding visuals or multimedia elements, or creating new internal links to improve site navigation and cross-linking to other content.

Once your blog is optimised, you can then republish the blog and promote it again on social media and through email marketing to attract a fresh generation of traffic.

Find Out More

Have a chat with one of the content marketing specialists at JDR today to find out how you can maintain the long-term relevance and value of your blog posts and keep driving traffic to your business.

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