With more search engine competition than ever before, even the tiniest of niches have found themselves in the need of increasingly creative and optimized content in order to remain relevant. In the world of search engine optimization, nothing can be taken for granted, and this approach now equally applies to the quantity and quality of your blog’s content. Many people have asked whether they should focus on creating consistent amounts of new content or focus on ensuring that their past content remains relevant. Each approach has its ups and downs: in the following article, we will explore these concepts a little more in order to help you discern which approach is more suitable for your blog.

Posting Advantages

Every time you create a new blog post, there are multiple benefits that can augment your blog’s presence. For starters, each new piece of content will encourage search engine crawlers to begin pinging your blog in order to index anything new since the last pass-through. Newly published content also provides a way for you to have something new for viral outreach, marketing efforts and social media management – while updating previously published content can be similarly useful, it is not comparable to an entirely new blog post about a different subject. New content that is relevant to a particular social issue, current event or pop culture reference will ultimately have a far higher chance of going viral when published than revised content.

Posting Disadvantages

One of the biggest disadvantages of posting new content continuously is the drain on your productivity that this can cause. While many think that a consistent amount of new content is required to demonstrate legitimacy, the quality and relevance of existing content is far more important – one of the key reasons some have decided updates are better than posts. In addition to this, sites with exceptionally large amounts of content have been traditionally down-rated by Google and other major search engines due to a seeming perception of quantity over quality. The less time you spend posting new content, the more time you can spend updating and revising existing, established pages and posts.

Updating Advantages

Sharing updated content that was already deployed once before is a definite benefit for many bloggers. Depending on the way the post was written initially, you may be able to convert a time-sensitive piece of content into evergreen content that will draw visitors in for years to come. In addition to this, updating content is far less taxing on the creative mind than developing something from scratch. You will be able to share this content again with your followers and friends, but new content tends to outperform revised content.

Updating Disadvantages

Some content simply will not be amenable to updates, meaning that you must choose to either leave it as is, create new content to compensate for it or delete it. When pinging your blog with updates, one of the biggest disadvantages is the lack of relevance some posts offer when it comes to revisions – particularly those built around pop culture and current events. Some updates will need to be performed more than once, as various topics remain “semi-evergreen” but will require updates every few months or so in order to remain relevant.