People trying to keep publishing usually worry about what to write next. But among the articles already published there is often one that would change substantially with a small amount of work, and that work pays better per hour.
Why updating has the advantage
A new article starts from zero. You wait for it to be indexed, wait for links to appear, and wait for the search engine to form a view of it.
An article already published is past all of that. It is indexed, it has internal links, and there is a record of which queries it appears for. The starting line is different.
Which article to pick
The three metrics from the previous part earn their keep here. In priority order:
An article with impressions that never reaches the front is the best candidate of all. The search engine has already decided it is relevant; you only have to fill in what is missing.
What to change
Title and description. If the words in your title differ from the queries you actually appear for, nobody clicks. Put the live phrasing into the title.
The missing answer. The queries bringing people in reveal questions you never answered. Add a subheading and answer one.
Stale facts. Fix renamed screens and changed procedures. A reader who follows your instructions and sees something different starts doubting the entire article.
Internal links. Connect the related pieces you published after it. This is usually the part left neglected longest.
A next step. Older articles frequently have none at all. Add exactly one.
Do not change the URL
Here is the classic accident: rewriting the title and changing the address along with it. Change the URL and every accumulated signal and inbound link breaks — at which point you have not updated anything, you have written a new article and thrown the old one away.
Change titles freely; leave addresses alone. If a URL genuinely must move, ship a 301 redirect from the old address at the same time, without exception.
Put updates on the schedule
Left as something to do “when it occurs to you”, updating never happens. A ratio such as one update for every four new articles keeps it moving on its own, and picking the target during your monthly metrics review makes it easier still.
Reading the metrics was covered in part six, and indexing and redirects go deeper in the SEO archive. Work that is hard to reverse — address migrations, large structural changes — runs with a verification procedure in our optimization program.
Next part
The final part is about AI: how far you can delegate, where delegation has to stop, and the standard we actually apply on this site.