Improving Your Blog Post: How Editing Impacts its Visibility on Google

Dibbyyan Nath
12 Min Read

Are you an owner of a blog on the internet? Always wanted to increase your ranking and wind up on the first result page? Did you know editing a blog post can affect your ranking on Google? Yes, editing your blog and making any change has an impact on your rankings.

Again, the changes you make might affect your ranking, but it is not very clear cut or black and white, for that matter. There is always a grey area. Depending on the kind of change you make and the quality of your content, your blog post can nosedive in the rankings or soar high and reach the top. I am discussing the impact of editing on your rankings and how you can use it to your advantage. So, let’s dive in.

Why You Should Consider Updating Old Blog Posts for SEO

Here are the reasons why updating old blog posts should be part of your overall content marketing and SEO strategy:

1. Improves Keyword Targeting and Optimization

When you first hit “publish” on a blog post, you likely do some keyword research to sprinkle relevant search terms throughout the content. But search intent changes over time. As Google’s algorithm gets better at understanding language and user expectations evolve, some of those original keywords you targeted decline in volume while new relevant queries pop up that you didn’t originally optimize for.

Page click and impression declining

When you revisit old blog post, you can analyze which terms now have weakening search volume and modify the content to better match current user intent. Swap in new keywords that are rising in popularity and better align with what readers are searching for today related to your topic.

You can also refine the overall keyword density at this point, ensuring that primary terms appear within the ideal 1-3% range so as not to trigger over-optimization penalties. This refinement of both keyword themes and density helps pages gain relevance in the eyes of search engines for ranking for the terms people are querying now.

2. Keeps Your Content Relevant, Timely and Useful

Certain posts will naturally become outdated over time, whether it’s industry statistics, trending topics, cultural references, recommended resources or visual aesthetics, it improves E-E-A-T signal. While evergreen informational content certainly has longevity, every post has a shelf life before it starts to feel stale.

Search engines like Google want to surface content that perfectly satisfies the user’s intent behind a given query. So freshening up your old posts signals that your content is still timely, relevant and delivering value – making Google more likely to rank it well in the SERPs.

Neglecting to update old content risks letting your pages become irrelevant in the eyes of both search engines and readers. Maintaining freshness and usefulness should be an ongoing effort.

3. Creates Opportunity to Strengthen Internal Linking

When you update an old blog post, you have a perfect opportunity to strengthen your internal linking structure in the process. Take time to assess whether you can link out to other more recent relevant content that didn’t exist when you first published the post.

John Mueller on Internal Linking: Super Critical for SEO. Watch the video starting at the 25:14 minute mark

This helps build the authority and ranking power of those newer pages while keeping your content closely interconnected for a better user experience. These optimized internal links also support for good SEO, as Google wants to see pages that are highly linked to from other high-quality pages.

4. Revives Reader Interest and Improves Engagement

Let’s face it, outdated content with stale facts/data, broken resources links and dated references does little to capture reader interest and engagement. Including new statistics, timely examples and current trends can help reignite reader interest in the post.

This freshness leads to lower bounce rates, longer time spent on page, more pages visited per session and an overall boost in reader engagement.

The editing affects the ranking.

If Google has already assigned your blog post a rank and gets traffic, editing will impact this ranking. Editing can work both ways. You can lose your ranking or gain a new ranking. Therefore, it all comes down to the level of editing you have done to your blog post and the niche your blog operates in. If you work in a competitive niche or fight for keywords, it is better to be the best source of information in Google’sGoogle’s eyes to keep your ranking.

Edit to rank better 

It would be useful for you to edit your blog regularly when you are in a niche whose landscape changes quickly. For example, your blog is in the technology field, and new advancements keep happening very often, rendering your posts or articles stale and outdated. If your article is getting traffic, then updating it will increase your ranking further.

You can also update your blogs when you need to enhance the content. It allows you to prune out the old content and keep it updated. It also makes for a better user experience. Update the videos on your blog post so that users can interact with the content better and do the marketing of your blog for you through word of mouth.

When you edit any of your blog posts, make them relevant by giving them time context. Your page title description plays an essential role in maintaining your ranking. Updating the meta title and the meta description in the webpage can improve its performance on a search result page. For example, which link would you click on more? “top 10 destinations to travel in the world” or “top 10 destinations to travel in the world after the pandemic”. Adding the context of time to the title makes them more relevant and increases the click-through rate leading to more traffic to your blog.

What to do if you are already number 1? Do you still need to edit?

Again there is no hard and fast rule for this. It will depend on what kind of niche you are working in and how old your blog posts are. You should edit your blog if you feel that your previous posts are not up to par and that your competition can quickly overtake you. Quality is the king for Google, and having quality content matters. You need to have reliable information from good sources to keep your ranking on the search result page.

Content update

I believe, if you already rank number 1 for a particular blog post, then a periodic review isn’t going to hurt you. Look into the quality and information your post provides. If it is fresh and good, then there is no need to edit the post. If you feel the content is not ”in” with the times and needs an update, please do so by engagingly editing the content and updating any video files or pics embedded in the blog post. I periodically review many of my blog posts myself and edit where necessary.

How to increase your ranking if your editing has dropped your ranking?

Now, we all edit because we want to increase our ranking. I believe no one intentionally wants to drop their ranking after editing their blog posts. I am discussing some of the steps you can take to increase your ranking after editing your blog posts.

Google Freshness

It is a bit of simple advice, and forgive me for even bringing it up because it is very basic. But it is the most overlooked mistake on your blog affecting your ranking. I am talking about spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Fix any spelling mistakes and grammatical errors because these simple mistakes will put off any reader to your site and lower your quality content. This, in turn, plays on your rankings as it creates a negative user experience.

Increase the freshness of your entire site, not only a few blog posts. According to Neil Patel (the king of SEO), Google prioritizes sites that update their content frequently.

If Google feels that you aren’t updating your site regularly enough, it will hurt the rankings of your site’s pages. A few updates on your critical articles will make your ranking skyrocket. At the same time, keep publishing new and valuable content to stay in the zone.

After editing a recent blog post, you find yourself dropped in ranking, and then you must revisit your older blog posts and see if you have any broken links. If your old content carries broken links or the URL has changed, you need to look into it and act accordingly, hurting your rankings.

When editing your blog, always link to better resources. These resources add value to your content, making it valuable to Google. Earning links by connecting to valuable resources has the twin benefit of increasing the value of your content, enabling a better user experience, and ranking higher on the search result page by optimizing your keywords. This prevents a drop in the rankings.

You can use Uber suggest, which gives you metrics on the keywords. It analyses your posts and gives you information on the keywords your site ranks for, the monthly search volume for your keywords, the monthly traffic directed at that keyword on your website, your blog’s current ranking for the keyword. Using this information, you can review your post and update your primary keyword, increasing your rankings.

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Dibbyyan Nath is a well-known entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the Chief Creative Officer of Inteliqo Research and Services. Mr. Nath, over the past two decades, has donned a lot of hats, while writing has remained his first love. Now he aims to express his experiences, as the head of a digital marketing, content creating, and website development company, through his love for writing. To keep up with the young entrepreneur and his thoughts
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