7 Step Checklist to Boost SEO by Updating Old Painting Blogs

75% of people searching online won’t go beyond the first page of the search results.

But what most people don’t know is updating old blog posts is extremely effective for boosting your SEO!

Here’s a 7 step checklist to boost SEO by updating old painting blogs.

1. Target Which Blogs To Update

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to figure out which of your blogs is going to need an update.

There are a number of ways that you can do this, but probably the best one is to see which of your blogs is not performing well.

If you use tools like Ubersuggest, you can have your whole site analyzed and it will tell you what articles get more or less traffic.

There’s also a good chance that your blog publishing site itself will tell you which of your articles are getting the most clicks.

You can use the information you get from this to decide which of your articles should be updated — one at a time, of course.

[Related: Painting Contractors: 9 Blogging Tools for Writing, SEO, Marketing, & Content Creation]

2. Check Your Headings

In the course of making up a blog article, it’s a good idea to organize the article with headings.

These headings have different uses — the H1 heading for the main title, the H2 for a second title, and H3 for your paragraph headings.

If you look over the text of your blog article and find that it doesn’t have any headings of course you need to add some.

If you do find that you have headings but they aren’t used the same in every article, make a plan and update your articles so they are the same.

3. Verify Your Photos Are Formatted Correctly

The way that your photos look on your blog article and the way that they are formatted isn’t always going to be the same.

What this means is that it’s entirely possible you have photos that are enormous in size but that the browser is making look smaller.

The problem with this is that even though the picture looks smaller, the size of the actual file remains just as large.

With many photos that are based on large files, you’re going to have problems with your articles taking a long time to load.

As you may know, taking a long time to load pushes off many possible readers — so make sure you have photos that are the right real size.

Here’s a great tutorial for formatting photos for your blog:

4. Update Your Meta Description

The next thing you’re going to want to do in updating your blog is to take a look at the meta description.

It’s entirely possible that when you originally wrote the blog article, you didn’t know the proper text for your meta description.

Now that you’ve spent some time writing blog articles, you can entirely rewrite the meta description and make it better.

You can research some of the keywords that are going to go well with the article using tools like Ubersuggest.

With a better meta description, your blog articles are going to perform better SEO wise.

5. Change The Date

Now that your blog article is basically updated, you’re going to want to update the date of the article itself to the present date.

The reason that this is a good idea is that updating the date to the present indicates to search engines that your article is new or updated.

Though you may want to preserve the original date of the publication to preserve the history of the article, don’t.

It’s far more important to update the date and time stamp so that you can boost the SEO of the article.

6. Add Internal Links

Though you may have written the blog article many months or even years ago, it’s a good idea to consider internal links.

If you have certain internal links added to the blog, perhaps you’ve written newer articles since then that are more relevant.

By adding internal links to your article, you’re going to do well for the SEO of the blog because search engines like seeing internal links on blogs.

It will also serve the readers of the blog and keep them on your blog.

When you add external links there’s a chance the person clicking may not come back.

By clicking links and staying on your blog, it will help them get the information they want while not leaving your page.

7. Remove Broken Links

Lastly, you need to make sure that there are no broken links on your blog articles.

Though this seems like it’s going to be a difficult and tedious task, it’s not if you know what you’re doing.

There are many tools that are going to be quite good at identifying pages that you have with broken links.

One such tool, UberSuggest, takes a deep look at your site and will tell you which links it finds that are broken.

If search engines find broken links on your pages, it does not take it well — for it suggests you aren’t paying attention to what content you put on your pages.

The best thing to do is to regularly check your links and make sure they all work.

Quick Recap:

1. To get started, you should have an idea of what needs to be updated, so target which blogs you are going to update.

2. Look at the blog overall and see that you have the right headings on the blog — a good distribution of H1, H2s, and H3s.

3. Photos that are incorrectly formatted can slow down and even wreck a blog article so make sure you check your photos are formatted correctly.

4. To ensure that search engines are going to find your blog post, update the meta description and make it more appealing to search engines with better keywords

5. Change the date of the blog publication to let search engines know that the blog has been updated.

6. To help out some of the other blog posts you have as well as the one you’re updating, add internal links to other blog posts of yours.

7. Since broken links are going to damage the SEO of your blog, remove broken links from your blog post.