Law Firm Marketing Blog Tips: How Revamping Old Posts Can Lead To SEO Success

If you’ve been blogging for a long time now, you need to go back through your archives and check out some of your old posts. We are not recommending you do this just for nostalgia’s sake, although we’re sure it will be an interesting trip down memory lane. No, the real reason you need to go revisit your old posts is because there’s a good chance they’re in need of revamping.

A lot has probably changed since you originally published your old posts. This includes the information surrounding the law topic you wrote about and even your standards for what a quality legal blog post should look like.

Your first inclination may be to delete old blog posts that appear lacking in current relevance or quality. While this is certainly an option, the better solution for dealing with old posts is to go back and re-edit them.

Why should you re-edit old blog posts?

• You put a lot of time into making those blog posts, and should reap all the rewards you can out of them.
• Many of your older blog posts likely still carry a lot of value, and may just need a few tweaks to regain popularity.
• Improving your old blog posts can lead to increased readership and higher organic traffic for your firm’s website.

Getting online viewers to your blog can often be a struggle for law offices, so you should take advantage of every opportunity you get to give your page views a boost. With a proper understanding of the value of SEO, you can give your old blog posts the necessary fixes to help them feel like new again.

Your Blog Needs To Be SEO Friendly

The biggest reason your firm takes the time to create blog posts is to provide a pathway for new customers to get to your website and hopefully learn more about your services. Unfortunately, people will often struggle to find your blog posts if they are not highly visible in online search results. This is where Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comes into play.

A quick refresher:

SEO, is a methodology of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in search engine results.

Making your blog posts SEO friendly is the key to generating a high level of organic traffic and developing a strong online presence for your firm. In order to make a blog post SEO friendly, you need to focus it around keywords and topics people care about. Unfortunately the keywords and topics people will frequently search for can change over time, which is why your once quite popular blog posts may now be buried deep in Google’s search results.

The freshness of your posts matter a great deal when it comes to being relevant in Google search rankings. The more you update your blog content, the more frequently search engines will look over and index your site pages. So by making edits to old blog posts, you give them more opportunity to achieve a higher page rank on Google and regain popularity.

Add Value To Your Posts

When you have blog posts with out of date information and data, the quality of your content will suffer, and you are more likely to experience higher website bounce rates. Google’s sophisticated algorithms will take note of this and rank your page lower as a result. You will not be able to fool Google with subpar content, so the best thing you can do to increase the search engine visibility of your pieces is improve their quality.

In a 2016 article from backlinko.com, SEO expert Brian Dean stated that by updating an old blog post with new content and images he was able to increase its organic traffic by 111.37%.

The more pieces you are able to go back and revamp, the more popular your blog site will have a chance to become. Note that some of your old pieces may be rather unimpressive and not worth reviving. However, many old posts are worth dedicating your time and energy to, and can be brought back to life with just a few simple edits.

So what are some of the things you can do to improve old blog posts?

Add relevant keywords:

Do proper keyword research, using programs like SEMrush, to find worthwhile keywords to inject into your story. Adding keywords with a lot of buzz around can help your post’s Google visibility. Make sure when doing so you add only appropriate keywords, and avoid keyword stuffing.

Adjust your blog title:

Your blog post title can have a large effect on its CTR (click through rate). Include any keywords you are trying to rank for in the title of your blog, and make sure they appear within the first 65 characters (which is where Google cuts off titles on search result pages).

Update information:

Facts and data change over time, so do the proper research and make sure you have the most up to date information in your posts. The passing of time is not an excuse for having inaccurate information in your blog.

Make them more visual:

If you neglected to add visual content such as pictures, infographics, and videos on the initial publishing of your blog, consider doing so now. Images not only make blogs posts appear more engaging, but can increase their SEO value. If you already have visuals on your page, make sure they are all still working properly and are correctly sized.

Check external links:

You need to go through every page you link to in your blog post, and make sure those pages are still in existence. Broken links will be detected by Google, and can keep your pages from ranking as high as you would like them to. Also consider adding new links to your story, if you find a relevant webpage that has been created since your original post.

Add new internal links:

Your catalog of blog posts is much bigger now than it used to be. Go back through older stories and see if there are any places to link more recent content. You can try to link any follow up pieces you made to your older posts, or posts covering a similar topic. Any time you can provide readers with an easy transition from one of your stories to another, it is a good thing.

Make grammar corrections:

Having a story littered with grammatical mistakes is one of the quickest ways to take a reader out of your story. Make sure you look through your post closely and clean up any errors you come across to improve your story’s readability.

Polish your writing:

If you have been consistently blogging for a long time, your writing has likely improved a great deal since your first post. When updating posts you should see plenty of opportunities to improve things like phrasing, vocabulary, and story structure.

After you have transformed your old posts into something you can be proud of, be sure to show them off on social media. This will give a ton of new online users a chance to fall in love with your old content.

Elevate Your Old Content To New Heights

Once you begin having success boosting your old posts, you can begin setting larger goals for your previously published content. For example, if you notice that your old blog pieces are not too far from being ranked on Google’s first page results for a particular keyword phrase, aim to get them on that first page. Even if your posts were originally published a long time ago, they still have the ability to reach first page heights after being revamped with the tweaks discussed in the last section.

According to a recent statistic from business2community.com, 75 percent of people never scroll past the first page of search results.

Having a blog post reach the first page in Google search results for a keyword that is relevant to your firm, can truly make a world of difference for your blog traffic. Getting on the first page will result in your posts being significantly more in search results, and will provide more opportunities for people to check out your blog site. The bottom line is that when one of your blog posts is within striking distance of the first page, you need to make the proper edits to push it across the finish line. The payoff is just too good to pass up on.

Make Quality Your First Priority

Updating your previous content is a must for helping your firm not only grab online viewers’ attention, but maintain it. Remember, getting people to your blog site does not guarantee they will want to stay and explore further. You never know what post on your site people will read first, so it is up to you to make sure that all your published content is worthwhile and leaves readers wanting more.

We know editing old blog posts can seem tedious, but the goal of blog writing should be to produce the best content possible. Having high quality posts is what will help your law firm blog stand out in today’s overcrowded online world.