Rethink or Republish: Choosing the Best Blogging Strategy

After a few months or a few years of blogging, there's gonna come a time when you're gonna want to revisit topics you've already written about. That's what we're looking at on today's episode of the Propel Your Practice Podcast. 

Welcome to the Propel Your Practice Podcast, where we talk about actionable strategies clinic owners and local businesses can use to help improve their online presence. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, and today's topic comes in from a listener who wrote in and had a question regarding blogging. 

Their question was, as it relates to SEO, they said that they had a blog that essentially was a rewrite based on a topic that was already written and up on their website, and they wanted to know if they should update the old blog post or publish the blog post as a new one. 

So that's what we're looking at on this episode. There are a number of questions that you want to ask yourself as you decide which direction to take. 

So, first off, it's much better to decide ahead of time if you are going to write a piece that is going to replace an old piece or if it's going to be a similar topic but not an exact match to the piece of content that already exists. 

You want to go back and look at the current piece of content, the older piece of content and see how it's currently ranking. Is it driving traffic to your website? Is it relevant? Is the information in there outdated? 

If the information that is currently on that post is outdated, then yes, you can simply do an update to that post. 

Now, an example of that might be: every winter, you put together a New Year's resolution blog post. Well, if you have the same one from last year and it just makes more sense to update it, that's different than saying that you have a blog post on New Year's resolutions and then you have a blog post on new workout regimens for the new year. Those are different. 

Even though they might cover the same topic, they're probably targeting slightly different keyword phrases, and they're not going to compete with each other. 

So, basically, you want to ask yourself if the new piece of content is going to compete with the old piece of content, or is the new piece of content a revised version of the old piece of content? 

If your answer is yes to either one of those two questions, then ideally, you would like to replace it with the old content. 

Now, once you've decided if you're going to replace it, then there are a few action steps that you want to take. 

One, you can simply copy and paste the new blog post over the content of the old blog post and update the year that it was published or the date that it's published. That's one way to handle things. 

If you do handle it that way, you want to make sure– if you're one of those people that plan ahead– if you mark a blog post at a published date that is ahead of the current date, meaning that if it is currently October and I set the publishing date for December, it's not going to show up anymore, meaning that it's not going to display on your website until that date hits. 

So that is something to consider because you do want to update the date that's associated with the blog post if you're updating it. 

Now, if you want to just do a clean slate and start a new blog post, you can easily create a new blog post with the new information and then do what we call a 301 redirect or URL redirect. 

That redirects the old URL to the new piece of content. That's the process that I would suggest that you go through if you're in the situation where you have written a piece of content that reflects another piece of content that's already on your website, and you're trying to decide if you should replace the old piece of content with the new piece of content or have them be separate pieces of content. 

Now, going back to the question, ideally, you want to do this before you start to write the new piece of content. 

Now, last year we did a series on blogging, and I'll include those links to some of the podcasts and blogs that we did before on this topic, but just to kind of go through some of those with you because I do think that they are amazing resources if you are blogging and want to know what to do with some of your old content or how to maximize your efforts with your new blog. 

So we did one that was titled What Do I Do With All My Old Blog Posts? which is a different way of looking at this question. Because you do have older blog posts that maybe you're not gonna update, which again is why this piece of content is different enough from that article on What Do I Do With an Old Blog Post. 

We also did one of my absolute favorite podcasts, which was The Anatomy of an Effective Blog Post. If you're considering giving new life to an old blog post or before you write your next blog post, I highly, highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode called the Anatomy of an Effective Blog Post. 

There was also an episode that was in that series on 12 Pro Tips for Creating Better Blog Posts and Blogging 101: How to Write a Great Blog Post. 

So let me know what you think. If you, again, have any questions that you would like to get some feedback on this podcast or see as an article written on the Propelyourcompany.com blog, we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media or, again, at propelyourcompany.com/podcast, where you can submit those topics. 

Thanks for listening to this episode. 

Well, hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads. 

You can find a link to sign up for this free masterclass in the Show Notes for this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence, including your Google Business Profile. That's what used to be called the Google My Business listing and what controls the Google Maps section, along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact. 

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.