Why You Should (and Shouldn’t) Optimize Blog Content

At this point, it’s no secret that we’re big proponents of having a content marketing strategy. Starting and maintaining a blog is a challenging task in itself, and if you’ve got that going, you deserve a pat on the back! But if you’re looking to take things to the next level, you should consider optimizing your existing content. Optimizing content gives you the opportunity to improve your stats while being less of a heavy lift than writing all-new content.

However, there are times when optimizing your old content can have diminishing or even negative returns. Here’s what you need to know about why you should – or shouldn’t – optimize blog content.

Reasons why you should optimize your blog content

Reason #1 – Your content is out of date.

Let’s say you have an article that’s already performing really well for you. In many cases, that would be a clear sign that you shouldn’t touch it – after all, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it! However, if your content is out of date, it’s a good idea to optimize regardless. Just be cautious and try not to mess with aspects of the post that are working for you.

The most obvious example would be if your article has a year or date in the title that clearly marks it as being old news. Simply changing “2024” to “2025” shouldn’t hurt your search ranking, and it helps your content feel fresh. If there are factual errors or outdated statements, go ahead and update those too.

If you find that so much needs to change that it’s becoming a whole new article, then consider whether it would be better to write a new one – but if you just need to change a few small things, optimizing makes sense.

Reason #2 – Your content is lacking SEO.

Starting a blog is hard work, and sometimes it’s easy to just write whatever comes to mind, hit “publish”, and call it a day. But if that’s how most of your blog posts came to be, then it might be worth revisiting and optimizing your old content.

Sometimes, it’s just as simple as making sure you choose a focus keyword that you then hit in your headings and bring up naturally throughout. Sometimes you just need to add some internal and external links to both promote your other content and cite your sources. And sometimes, you might revisit your old content and realize that the writing needs some touchups – like perhaps you wrote at a higher or lower reading level than is appropriate.

Regardless, if you didn’t write your content with SEO in mind in the first place, it’s a good idea to revisit what you’ve written. Tools such as Grammarly, Hemingway, or SEObility can help you check your grammar, reading level, and SEO, respectively.

Reasons why you shouldn’t optimize blog content

Reason #1 – Your content starts to feel unnatural.

If you’ve already written your content with SEO optimization in mind, there can be a certain point where your content starts to feel unnatural. Optimizing for SEO should never come at the expense of the reader’s experience. Most people have come across pages that feel like SEO farms – the content is stuffed with keywords to the point where it’s unpleasant to read. It feels fake, it feels robotic, and ultimately, it puts people off. The whole point of developing content is to ensure that your brand feels like an authority, and overstuffing keywords has the opposite effect.

This can also apply to the links you provide in your posts. Providing a link is a sign that you’d like the reader to consider clicking. If your paragraphs are littered with link after link, it starts to feel strange – like you’re trying to get them to leave. It’s very unlikely that your readers would truly benefit from that many links. It feels like you’re manipulating the algorithm, and readers will be able to tell.

If a link is genuinely helpful, by all means include it! But if you’re just trying to stuff as many links as possible in the hopes that it will boost your SEO, it might have the opposite effect to what you intended.

Reason #2 – Your content is already performing well.

As we said earlier – if it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. So be cautious when optimizing pieces of content that are already performing really well for you. If you make too many changes, you might end up undoing whatever made the post successful for you in the first place. The last thing you want to do when optimizing is to make things worse for yourself! If there are any actual errors – typos or broken links, say – you can fix those without worry. That might actually help you. But don’t change content just for the sake of change.

If a post is performing well for you, clearly, you did something right! Instead of optimizing an already successful post, consider taking a deeper look at that post and trying to figure out what made it work for you. An SEO checker could come in handy here. Don’t mess with success – replicate it!