It is a significant mark of achievement when your local business gets to the point where you have a content publishing process up and running that truly works for you. It fits your time budget, serves your goals, brings results, and is, most importantly, well-tuned to audience demand.

You’re publishing excellent articles, blog posts, guides, reports, infographics, and other assets. And if you’ve really become a pro at this, you are remarketing those assets along the 80/20 rule of spending 20% of your time creating content and the other 80% promoting it.

But a point comes for every asset in your content marketing treasure chest at which you either:

1. Forget its existence

2. Notice it’s gotten old and outdated

Instead of seeing the benefits of your past hard work evaporate over time, the local business you’re marketing can embrace the following process to make older content keep working for you.

Hopefully, your CMS enables tracking your articles by date so that you can set a beginning and end point for the content you want to surface for review. If not, make a copy of this free Google Sheet, labeled with the title, link, date, topic, and status of the pieces you want to assess.

Schedule time for this process at least once a year. The rate at which your content becomes outdated will be based on:

• How quickly things change in your industry

• How often things change at your business

• How much timely vs. evergreen content you write

In our fictitious example above, an article about building a birdfeeder from garden waste is likely to be as applicable in 2024 as it was in 2019. However, it might offer you some new internal linking opportunities to new content you’ve developed since initial publication. But a news-oriented piece directing local birdwatchers where to go to spot an eagle nesting in the local community in 2019 may certainly be outdated five years later if the birds have moved on. If you focus a lot on current events, it stands to reason that yesterday’s news has become old news today, yet it can still have value in many cases. You just need to know how to assess each piece you have under review.

Let’s look at a fictitious blog example for each of the paths shown in the above graphic. We’ll imagine you own a plant nursery with an active blog. It’s 2024, and you’ve realized your content from five years ago may not be representing your business accurately or productively today, so you start looking at all your blog posts from 2019.

You begin with the big question: Is this content still relevant?

Post #1

The answers are “yes” and “yes” for post number one, in which you did a case study on compost. People still need to know about which compost brands are best, so yes, the subject of this article is still relevant.

But upon review, you realize that, yes, some of the information is outdated because one of the five brands you tested is no longer available, and there are also several mentions of the year 2019 in the post. That could signal to both people and search engine bots that your content is outdated.

You need to let readers know that one of the products was discontinued and suggest a suitable replacement brand. You could also remove references to 2019. It doesn’t really matter when you did this particular case study, and if you note that you’ve updated the post for 2024, readers and search engines will know the information is fresh and accurate.

Post #2

Here, the answers are “yes,” this subject is still relevant, and “no,” the information isn’t outdated, but the timestamp on the post is getting old.

In 2019, you documented what happened when you planted part of your nursery with a native plant to attract Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies, and you photographed the results. There’s nothing dated about the post, but you could refresh it with another photo shoot showing how butterfly numbers have increased across the five years since you did the planting. You could re-share this updated and inspirational post across your social channels, secure in the knowledge that you are sharing interesting, current information.

Post #3

Next up, you answer “no” to whether the content is still relevant from a post about water rationing regulations in your area in the summer of 2019, because, thankfully, your community has had lots of rain over the past couple of winters.

But you can also answer “yes” to whether the content could be revised and republished to become relevant once more. Drought-tolerant landscaping is a core benefit of gardening with native plants, and you could rework the piece to be about the general principles of this, with a look back at 2019, so that customers are prepared for future periods of drought.

Post #4

Finally, we come to a post about the former owner of the business, who sold the nursery to you in 2020. This means that “no” the content is no longer relevant, and “no” revising it really isn’t an option because the person featured in the piece is no longer associated with the brand.

Instead, you could write a new post featuring the current owner of the company and retire and redirect the 2019 post to the new content.

As you go through each piece of older content, it will help you if you log the status of each piece in your spreadsheet, such as “update,” “refresh,” revise,” and ‘“retire,” with your notes about what should be done with each asset.

Our fictitious nursery example shows a local business facing a big task with a considerable backlog of multiple years of content to assess. You may be in this very situation right now. But you can do better going forward, assessing your older content more regularly so that you only have to review smaller sets in the future at manageable intervals.

The great thing is that once you’ve reviewed and updated any strong older pieces, you’ll have a huge array of refreshed assets you can proudly promote on your website and across all your social channels. The 80 — 20 rule can definitely do more for you if you don’t let older work slip through the cracks!

Looking for some more simple and strategic tips? We’ve got four free chapters of advice for you in Moz’s Local Business Content Marketing Guide, including lessons for twelve of the most respected local SEOs in the world. Keep learning with Moz for success in the year ahead!