How To Update "Impossible" Website Content
As your website grows, "updating" things becomes a larger and larger task. For example, with new niche site that has 20 blog posts, you can overhaul your entire site in a relatively short amount of time. It might take a week to get every single article edited and expanded.
Done and done.
What happens when you have a 10 year old website and 2,000 blog posts? Well, things get more complicated. Getting your content up to date can seem like an impossible task.
Looking back on my work througout the years, I have seriously improved my writing and general blog post making. There are hundreds of blog posts on my website that I'd like to go back and improve, but how can I undertake such a gigantic project without dedicated ALL of my time to it?
I have a couple of options.
1. Don't Update
I have the option of just leaving everything as is. Honestly, that's what I did for many years, and it worked pretty well. Sure, my website wasn't "the best" out there. There was a lot of shoddy work. But it made money.
In other words, not all of your articles have to be utterly amazing to make money.
Pros:
- Less tedious work
- Get to sweep problems under the rug
- Can work on more interesting projects
Cons
- Demoralizing to have a website full of garbage
- Lots of keyword cannibalizing (rewriting for the same keywords)
- Feels like writing endless content with no purpose
2. Hire Help
Outsourcing is a great way to leverage money to create more time. When you don't have enough time in the day to do something, you can pay for other people's time. You can find inexpensive VAs that can do anything from spiff up your current content, to rewriting the entire content, to doing a full blog post with custom images and videos.
Pros
- Get a lot done in less time
- You can focus on "bigger picture" projects
- Just do the tasks you enjoy
Cons
- Requires training the VAs
- Content style my not reflect your brand
- Costs money
3. Do It Yourself
Surprisingly, there's a pretty simple way to just do it yourself. I like to create a "doable" amount of work each day and set a long term timeline. For example, if I have to update 200 blog posts, I'll do just ONE per day for 200 days.
Sure, it takes a long time to get everything updated, but it's less stressful this way, and you still make time for other work that needs to be done. It's less overwhelming this way.
At the end of that (almost) year long updating process, you'll have 200, incredible, amazing, fresh blog posts that will improve rank in search engines and convert traffic to clicks and sales more efficiently.
Pros
- You have full control over the content
- Cheap and effective
- Google loves updated/fresh content
- Signals to visitors you are active and engaged
- Great fodder for email lists and social media
Cons
- Takes a long time
- Can interfere with current projects and goals
- Very tedious at times
- Can be easy to slip into "rush" mode and just replaces low-quality content with medium-quality content
Which Articles Should You Update?
You don't have to update every single article on your website constantly. Some articles do fine as they are for quite a while!
Other articles simply don't rank, and don't deserve to be updated. How do you know the difference?
There are two main sets of articles I update:
1. Articles that get traffic. These are the top choice for updating. They are already ranking and already getting traffic. Double down on what's working instead of trying to fix what's not working.
2. Pillar Articles. These are core concept articles within your website that you link back to frequently. Even if they don't rank, they are still a great resource on your webiste which you can leverage to promote affiliate links, collect emails, or just engage with your audience.
Final Thoughts
Updating your website content is good for both search engines and your human audience. It can be a challenge to do it regularly, especially if you have a large amount of content. With clear goals in mind and a consistent strategy, it's not an impossible problem.
The folks who update will benefit in the long term!
Recent Comments
82
We only started our current website last August but have already started 'tinkering' with our earlier posts. What you post has shown us is that we need to do this in a far more structured way, not only from a scheduling perspective but also in being more selective in the posts we choose to update. Thank you, Nathaniel.
Colette and Philip
I would add trying to update articles that are on page 2 that were once on page 1. The little love you give those articles can lead to great things a lot faster than articles that may deeper in the search results.
Thanks for this info. This is good to know. Although I don't have that many to update, I will try to do them slowly and keep them up to date. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for these ideas. I tend to feel like I should fix my worst posts so thanks for explaining we should actually fix up our good posts. I don't have thousands of posts (or even hundreds) yet so I should be able to update all of mine. I have worked on some of them but there is still more to do.
Updating existing posts is a great thing to do if you just don't feel inspired to write anything new! That is where I am right now so I will start updating.
Jessica
I update some and just leave some! Writing my memoirs as a series of books is much more fun and may turn out to pay better. Can't wait to get to "I Fell in Love with a Hippie"
A good reminder to perhaps start updating articles sooner rather than later, or at least before the number of articles becomes too large.
Definitely. I tend to let things get out of hand, and I'm really trying to NOT do that starting in 2019 :)
Funny you should write about this today. I spent yesterday working on updating an article because the main plugin mentioned is now broken 👀😒 I've still got lots to do. It's a long pillar article which gets traffic.
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Thank you for the great advice, Nathaniell. I like the #3 option. In that way I am in the full control of my website. The only thing I need is a good time management skill.
It’s hard to imagine how much work it will be when I have hundreds or thousands articles on my site. So maybe it’s better to keep things up to date.
Thanks again for sharing this with us.
Amy
Updating thousands of articles is tough work, and I think most blogs, if they are run by a single person, would definitely slow down their content publishing schedule.