The Blog Growth Mistake Most Bloggers Don’t Even Know They’re Making

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Maybe you’re posting regularly, your photos are decent, and you even sat down and learned a bit of SEO at some point. And your blog growth is still just … fine. It’s not really growing, but it’s not really shrinking either … it’s just sort of there. Potentially a little bit stuck. Like a turtle in treacle.

It’s actually a bit tricky to spot a plateau in blog growth like this. We’re so used to looking for spikes in our blog traffic, or really low dips (especially after Google updates its algorithm again!), and so it can be hard to see that actually you’ve been at this steady number for months and months now.

And it’s not necessarily something super obvious you’re doing wrong, but I do think that there’s something you can do about it to help you un-stagnate in your blog traffic.

The blogging mistake I think might be the culprit in this situation? You’re not updating your older blog posts.

And look, new blog posts are super important – heck, I share a new blog post here every single week – but, and I’m reminding myself of this here, too, updating your older blog posts is just as important.

And it can make a big difference.

Why updating old blog posts matters more than you think for blog growth

I get why you’re doing it (or not doing it), because I totally hear that sharing new blog posts feels like you’re moving in the right direction and you’re getting fresh content out there.

And it is good, to a point. But if you’ve got 50, 100, 500 posts sitting in your archive and you’ve never gone back to any of them, you’re sitting on a pile of content that’s slowly going stale while you keep adding more to the top. Which sounds ew. Ha.

Updating your older blog posts is important for several reasons:

1. Google/search engines notices when a post hasn’t been touched in three years.
2. So do your readers, if they land on outdated info, dead links, or screenshots from an app that’s changed its whole interface since you wrote about it.
3. The facts or stats that you wrote about five years ago were correct at the time, but now they’re not.
4. If you’ve written about places or platforms or things with changeable information, you want to make sure you’re giving your readers updated information
5. And you’re missing out on traffic because search engines (and AI summaries and chats) aren’t going to be recommending content that isn’t correct anymore.

Why a blog growth plateau is hard to spot

As I mentioned, a plateau of traffic is a bit harder to spot. You really have to change your stats and analytics to ‘last 6 months’ or even longer to see that actually you haven’t really grown. You’ve been pretty same-same for months, or you’ve had a bit of a dip but then plateaued.

A plateau means your numbers don’t fall off a cliff, so there’s no alarm bell telling you something’s wrong. You just… stop climbing. And because nothing looks super broken, it’s really easy to assume you’re doing fine and the problem is Google, or the algorithm, or bad luck.

It’s rarely bad luck.  🙈

It’s often that half your best-performing posts from two or three years ago have slipped down the rankings while you weren’t looking, and nobody sent you a memo about it. (But wouldn’t it be nice if they did??)

What this actually looks like in practice

Say you wrote a post in 2020 about the best apps for bloggers. It did well. It ranked, it brought in traffic, maybe it did really well on Pinterest for a while, and you moved on to the next post. Yay! Go you! 🎉🥳

Fast forward to now, and three of those apps have been rebranded, one’s been shut down entirely, and there are two brand new ones you haven’t even mentioned. Someone lands on that post today, sees it’s out of date within the first paragraph, and leaves. Search Engines notice that too, eventually. Oops.

Meanwhile, you’ve spent the last two years writing new posts instead of spending even twenty minutes updating that one. It’s still sitting there in your archive, losing ground when it could be doing so much more work for you.

How to spot if this is happening to you

So how do you actually figure out if this is happening? Here are a few things you can check:

1. Open your top 10 posts by traffic from a year or two ago. Are they still your top 10, or have they slipped?
2. Do any of your older posts reference tools, prices, or screenshots that are out of date?
3. When did you last actually update a post that’s more than 18 months old?

If you find a bunch of blog posts that used to be doing well and bringing traffic into your blog, and they need an update … that’s your new job. Move it to the top of your blogging to-do list.

You don’t need to overhaul your whole archive overnight, though. Something that I like to do is update an older blog post when I publish a new one. Now, this doesn’t always work, and I need to get better at it, but it’s a really good system.

If you need a bit of a game plan to update your old blog posts

1. Pick your top five posts by traffic and go through them properly
2. Update anything outdated, add anything that’s missing, tighten up the intro so it actually answers what someone’s searching for
3. Make sure your keywords are still working for that blog post and that you’ve done your SEO basics for the post
4. Then move down your list from there, a post or two at a time, alongside your regular content

Older, well-performing posts that get a proper refresh tend to bounce back faster than a brand new post takes to rank in the first place.

You’re working with something that search engines are already familiar with (even if they aren’t really showing it to anyone at the moment), so you’re not really starting from zero, even if you’re getting minimal traffic to those blog posts at the moment.

Right, over to you!

Updating your old posts isn’t the fun part of blogging, unless you really really like it (and honestly I don’t mind it haha it’s nice to see how far I’ve come in blog post writing, especially when I’m looking at posts from 10 years ago!). And writing new content will probably always feel more exciting and fun and enjoyable.

But if your blog growth has flatlined and you can’t work out why, this is one of the first places to look, and one of the quickest wins available to you. Even if you just spent an hour every week updating a blog post … you’ll be amazed at the difference it will make!

How often do you update your blog posts? How often would you LIKE to be updating blog posts? Let me know in the comments!