Why Updating My Old Content Has Helped Me A Lot More Than I Thought

byChrisTowers

4.5K followers

1 week ago

For a long time, I put most of my time into writing new content. New posts all the time, new ideas, new topics. I was always under the impression that was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING! My old posts were just “done” in my mind, so I never really went back to them.

After a while though, I started to notice a couple of things. Some of my older posts still got traffic even though I had not looked at them for ages. Others though, were hardly getting any views at all. A few had titles that no longer matched the way I write now. Some had Meta Titles and Descriptions that made me wonder what the hell I was thinking that day.

That is when I started spending some time updating them instead of always creating something new.

Of course, it was hard to change everything at once. So I just picked one post and went through it slowly. The first thing I did was read it like a normal visitor would. As I did that, I asked myself some questions. Does this still make sense? Is anything missing? Is anything confusing? That on its own showed me a quite few things.

Quite often I found some small things that were easy to fix. Maybe a sentence was too long. Maybe a heading was not very clear. Maybe I had used the same phrase too many times in one paragraph. OK I did not need to rewrite all this, but just did a bit of clean up.

Then I looked at the title and description. On some posts, they were far too vague. On others, they did not really describe what the post was actually about. Changing these has helped, and it did not take me too much time.

Another thing I started doing was adding small updates where I thought it made sense. If I had learned something new since writing the post, I would add a short section with an extra example or a better tip. I just wanted each one to be more helpful than it was before.

What I found was how much better I felt about my site after doing all this. Instead of thinking of my older content as something done and dusted, I looked at it as something I could keep improving on. It also took away some of the pressure from always having to keep writing something brand new all the time.

I also found that working on some of my old posts can be easier than starting from a blank page. You already have the structure, the ideas, and most of the writing is already there. You are just making what you already have a bit better.

Of course, this does not mean I stopped writing new content. New posts are of course still important. But by also doing some regular updates, I get more out of the work I have already done. It feels like I am taking better care of my website instead of just building it and leaving things behind.

If you have been here at WA for a while and you have a few posts published, it might be worth picking just one of the older ones and giving it another look. You do not need to rewrite everything. But some small changes could help!

What about you. Do you ever go back and update your older content, or are you mostly concentrating on new posts at the moment.

Thanks for reading and hope you all have a good day :)

Chris