5 reasons you should update your listicles every year
Who doesn’t love a good list? We make them for our groceries, and boy do we love to make them for our websites. Over recent years we’ve seen listicles take over the internet, and since then we’ve also seen them mature from clickbait headlines and thin content to helpful pieces that drive great organic traffic. So how do you maximize these pieces? The simple answer is by keeping them fresh. So without further ado, read our list of ways to make the most out of your listicles and keep your readers (and Google) well-informed with the newest gear on the market.
1) Preserve SEO Authority
By and far, the greatest benefit to updating your listicle content is the ability to carry-forward the existing page authority and rankings. Simply put, this means that you get to build from the foundation that you created rather than starting from scratch. Changing up the content might mean you see rankings fluctuate, with some keywords coming and going, but you’ll keep the value of links, both internal and external. This means that getting your page ranking in organic search will be easier.
How do you do this functionally? And can you save your old content if you want to? Both questions are intertwined. Updating your existing content is as easy as going into your CMS (content management system, like Squarespace or Wordpress) and editing. This way, the new content will show on the existing URL, harnessing the authority you’ve built for it. Saving your existing content means that you need to move it to a new URL. Cloning functions in your CMS can be helpful here. Check out the URLs below for an example. To avoid mismatching the content with the URL, don’t include the year in the URL of the main page that will receive updates.
yoursite.com/’listicle’ (new content goes here, no year in the URL) -> yoursite.com/’listicle’-2020 (copy old content to here)
2) Creates Calendar Content
As site owners and marketers, we’re always looking for new content to fill our outbound marketing channels like email and social. Building content updates into your editorial calendar is an amazing way to provide great and engaging content that is both fresh and a reliable piece of your calendar.
3) It’s Easier Than Creating New Content and Cheaper
This one is pretty obvious, but we’ll say it anyway. Less dragging and dropping, less fixing those quirks in your CMS that you know and love - the bones are all there, so your freshly updated article is plug & play! Plus, less work means less labor, making it cheaper to update an old article than to write a new one.
4) Opportunity to Monetize With Affiliates
If your site participates in an affiliate program, updating your listicles can help you to continue to drive revenue from an old article. Maybe the products listed on the old page are no longer in stock, or you have new affiliate partnerships that can be added. Update them and boom, you just added a revenue stream.
You can take a systematic approach to these updates by prioritizing articles for updates based on organic traffic. Pull this info from your analytics platform, then you can sort articles by traffic, and choose to update the pieces that get the most traffic, maximizing your impact.
5) It Can Help Drive New Content Ideation
Sometimes there is no better way to come up with new article ideas than looking at some old pieces. For example, maybe you had a piece on the “10 best IPAs.” Revisiting this piece might give you the genius idea to branch out into newer and popular topics, like “Best Hazy IPAs.” This method of branching out and ideatating based on your older content can really help to build your topical relevance and expertise on a topic by creating a whole web of related content. Equally important in this strategy is the internal links that you can create between pieces, which can help drive SEO page authority.
Next Up: Reshare The Updated Post!
Once you have updated your article with the latest gear and keywords, reshare across your channels and encourage brand references to reshare as well. The more the merrier. Don’t worry if you have already shared the article in the past, many readers may have missed your list in the past, and those who do remember the article will be excited about the updates.
Takeaways
As content publishers, we often focus solely on creating new content, ignoring all of the hard work that we’ve done in the past. Older listicles and articles can have great value from all of the links and search traffic that they’ve garnered since publishing - which means looking back and updating them with some fresh content can drive major value. When crafting your content strategy remember that both new AND old articles can create value in the future.