Why You Should Blog Less and Update More

While there aren’t many marketers who still feel you need to blog everyday, most will agree that you should blog often for a variety of reasons. However, I’m going suggest that it might be time to bring that sacred cow to the slaughter house and that, the more posts you publish, the more of a liability you are creating for yourself.

 In the early days of SEO and website publishing, more was definitely better. The more pages you had, the more chances you had to rank. There was no concept of pages needing a minimum quality to rank. A second point is the concept of page age: in the early days, Google wasn’t able to extract the date that a page was published, so publish date played no role in ranking or in user click thru in the SERP’s. When you acknowledge two other, crucial issues–Google really doesn’t like “infinite websites” and each page adds to the maintenance of the site–eventually you realize that there are potentially more  consequences than benefits to frequent updates.

I know some of you reading still aren’t convinced. You think that you need to publish frequently to convince clients of your expertise. Or you need to enhance your practice branding and remind people that you exist and are (still) relevant. However, I’d argue that most of what you are posting are rehashes of posts you have done in the past using a new, recycled  title mixed with a current event/pop culture reference. Don’t believe me? See if you recognize these post titles from any of your colleagues’ websites or–worse–your own blog:

• How to Make Your Analytics Reports More Beautiful than a Double Rainbow … and Know What it Means!
• Why You Don’t Need to Be A Grumpy Cat When Working on Your Link Building
• How to Make Your Infographics Stand Out Like Honey-Boo-Boo in A Bikini
• What Dance Moms Can Teach You About Dealing with Crazy Clients

To fully illustrate what I mean, I’ll show you that each of those titles laden with eye catching title bait is actually a timeless concept:

• Creating Professional Analytics Reports With Clear Actionable Information
• Link Building Strategies That Won’t Make you Crazy
• How to Make Sure your Infographics Go Viral
• Strategies For Dealing with Difficult Clients

The second part of this strategy is to understand that, while avoiding clever trendy tie-ins does give your post a longer lifespan, all posts will be still need to be updated–some more often than others. For example, “Dealing With Difficult Clients” isn’t something that’s going to change every year; in fact, it can probably go 3-5 years before needing to be updated. However, “Creating Professional Analytics Reports” is something that needs to be updated or at least reviewed every 12-18 months.

The third part of this strategy is implementation. When you do decide revisit/rewrite a post, DO NOT publish it under a new URL. Use the same URL. Either delete or move the old information to the bottom–whichever makes the most sense. Lastly, make sure you update the date that that is associated with the post to get an advantage from updating the post. Be sure to reshare the updated post on social media channels. The final bonus is, if the post is good, and you get any new links, they will be added to any old links. This is a very good signal to send to the search engine.

To sum up the key points of this post:

• Understand that more posts create more maintenance points and more areas for your blog to have old, outdated information
• When you don’t integrate clever and trendy ideas into your posts, they become evergreen content with timeless information
• Understand that you will have to update these posts to keep that evergreen content quality
• Update your posts in a way that gives you the greatest benefit: update the date and don’t change the URL