{"id":59035,"date":"2022-05-05T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T14:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=59035"},"modified":"2023-10-12T15:38:52","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T22:38:52","slug":"study-how-blog-post-updates-affect-keyword-growth-in-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/content\/study-how-blog-post-updates-affect-keyword-growth-in-2022.htm","title":{"rendered":"Study: How Blog Post Updates Affect Keyword Growth in 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The benefits of refreshing or rewriting old blog posts to breathe new life into a website are well-established and include more traffic, new backlinks, and improved keyword rankings.<\/p>\n

Consequently, content recycling is among the most popular content strategy and SEO trends for bloggers, with 71% reporting they refreshed old articles in 2021, an 18% increase since 2017, according to Orbit Media’s 2021 blogging statistics report.<\/a><\/p>\n

Keep reading to nerd out about the study background, my analysis method, and the findings. If you want to delve into my actionable takeaways, skip to the “What the Results Mean for Blog SEO and Keyword Strategy”<\/a> section.<\/p>\n

Study Background<\/h2>\n
There are many<\/em> ways to refresh a blog post<\/a> and each tactic requires different resources and effort. But is there one strategy that surpasses all others?<\/p>\n
If you ask this question to 100 content marketers, I suspect most people will answer “no” and then give you one of two options to explore (depending on your article’s performance):<\/p>\n
\n
Rewrite the entire blog post using SEO best practices and competitive research.<\/li>\n
Keep things simple and only update the information necessary to compete with the content that outranks your article.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
I’ve followed and prescribed those two tactics for years. And while most refreshed blog posts perform better when compared to the original version, the improvements are often inconsistent.<\/p>\n
The inconsistency is also observable in published studies about the value of updating blog content. Authors try different strategies and (unsurprisingly) get different results.<\/p>\n
For example, Backlinko’s content update experiment<\/a> yielded 260% more organic traffic, while HubSpot’s similar study<\/a> shows a 106% organic traffic increase.<\/p>\n
To solve this disparity, I wanted to figure out what makes Google’s algorithms tick when they notice updated content.<\/p>\n
Study Methodology<\/h2>\n
To quantify how Google treats content updates, I collected 60 of Portent’s blog posts, divided them into three groups, and applied a different update severity to each cluster.<\/p>\n
I think organic traffic is a misleading metric for this type of study because it relies on user behavior and doesn’t truly measure how valuable search engines find the updated content.<\/p>\n
Instead, I used Ahrefs’ batch analysis tool<\/a> to track keyword growth (ranking position 1-100), first-page rankings (position 1-10), backlinks (linking domains), and SERP features. I believe these metrics are universal and better represent Google’s opinion rather than ever-fluctuating user behavior.<\/p>\n
I measured keyword growth for each blog post in one-month intervals, starting on the date the blog post was updated and ending two full calendar months after the update.<\/p>\n
For this experiment, I separated content into three update types:<\/p>\n
\n
High-effort blog post rewrites<\/li>\n
Medium-effort updates<\/li>\n
Low-effort updates<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Let’s break down what each classification entails.<\/p>\n
High Effort<\/h3>\n
In 2021, Portent’s team rewrote more than 30 outdated or underperforming blog posts, often from scratch. I randomly chose 20 of the updated articles for this study.<\/p>\n
These articles were worked on and republished throughout the year. The writing process involved:<\/p>\n
\n
New keyword research<\/li>\n
Refining, modernizing, or adding information<\/li>\n
Adding supplemental graphics (when possible)<\/li>\n
Creating new internal links<\/li>\n
Updating the title tags and meta descriptions<\/li>\n
Occasionally rewriting the blog post title (H1)<\/li>\n
Updating the publish date<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Depending on the author, the blog posts took anywhere from four to 10 hours to refresh.<\/p>\n
Medium Effort<\/h3>\n
You don’t need to overhaul every blog post with a complete rewrite. Sometimes, you need a quick tune-up with annual maintenance to keep your evergreen content relevant for users.<\/p>\n
A medium-effort update generally takes up to a few hours to gather new research and purge outdated information. Because this process is reasonably quick, you can update dozens of old blog posts per week.<\/p>\n
To reflect these medium-effort updates, I randomly selected 20 of Portent’s blog articles published before January 1, 2021.<\/p>\n
I then updated each article and republished them on January 31, using WordPress to manually assign each post a randomized publish date between January 1, 2022, and January 25, 2022.<\/p>\n
Twelve of the blog posts received a new:<\/p>\n
\n
Title tag<\/li>\n
Meta description<\/li>\n
Blog post title (H1)<\/li>\n
Introduction<\/li>\n
Publish date<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The remaining eight blog posts got an updated:<\/p>\n
\n
Title tag<\/li>\n
Meta description<\/li>\n
Blog post title (H1)<\/li>\n
Publish date<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Low Effort<\/h3>\n
Sometimes you have an evergreen blog post that doesn’t need to get updated to be relevant, but you’re losing rankings compared to newer content.<\/p>\n
So, what can you do to make users and search engines believe you’ve added new, valuable content to your old blog posts — even if you didn’t?<\/p>\n
The simplest method I thought of is updating the “published on” date, which I did for the remaining 20 blog posts. Once again, these blog posts were randomly selected from Portent’s blog and were initially published before January 1, 2021.<\/p>\n
I again used WordPress to modify the publish date to a random date between January 1, 2022, and January 25, 2022.<\/p>\n
However, I didn’t touch a single word of the post or update any metadata. The only alteration was the publish date. Each update took about three minutes.<\/p>\n
Study Findings<\/h2>\n