Last reviewed: February 2026

When to Update Old Law Firm Blog Posts for SEO

Content decays. Not dramatically — not a cliff drop that triggers alarms. A steady downward drift over three months. A page that held page one for six months quietly slides to page two. The content has not changed, but the search landscape around it has. Competitors published newer, more comprehensive versions. A statute referenced in the post was amended. The statistics you cited are two years old.

Decaying content on a law firm website does more damage than most firms realize, because outdated legal information does not just lose traffic. It erodes the trust signals Google uses to evaluate your entire domain.

When Declining Performance Signals an Update

Not every traffic decline means a post needs updating. Seasonal topics naturally ebb and flow. A post about “DUI penalties during holiday season” will lose traffic in March regardless of content quality. The signals that indicate a genuine update need are more specific.

Declining impressions over two or more consecutive months, while the post’s target keyword still has stable or growing search volume, means Google is losing confidence in your page’s relevance for that query. Check Search Console’s Performance report. Filter by the post’s URL and compare impressions month over month.

Dropping average position, from page one to page two or from top five to bottom five, while competitors’ pages for the same keyword are newer and more comprehensive, suggests a content freshness or depth problem. Google is not penalizing your page. It is promoting pages that better serve the current searcher intent.

Falling click-through rate, even when impressions hold steady, can indicate that your title tag or meta description no longer competes with newer results in the SERP. Sometimes the fix is not a content overhaul but a title tag refresh.

The threshold for “update candidate” versus “leave it alone” is practical: if the post drove meaningful traffic or conversions in the past and has lost more than 30% of its peak performance over three or more months, it deserves evaluation. Posts that never performed well are not update candidates. They are candidates for replacement or removal.

Update, Rewrite, or Retire

Every declining post gets one of three treatments, and the choice depends on what is wrong.

Update when the core content is still relevant but specific elements are outdated. This includes refreshing statistics with current data, updating legal references to reflect current law, adding sections that address questions competitors now cover, improving heading structure for better snippet eligibility, and strengthening internal links to newer related content. An update preserves the existing URL, maintains accumulated backlinks, and signals freshness to Google.

Rewrite when the post’s angle, structure, or depth is fundamentally insufficient for today’s SERP. If competing pages have evolved from 800-word overviews to 2,000-word comprehensive guides with FAQ sections, schema markup, and supporting visuals, an update will not close that gap. A rewrite means keeping the URL and topic but rebuilding the content from scratch, applying current SEO standards, and treating it as a new piece on an established URL.

Retire when the post targets a keyword your site now covers better elsewhere, when the topic is no longer relevant to your practice, or when the post has never generated meaningful traffic and shows no signs of potential. Retirement means either redirecting the URL to a more relevant page (if the post has backlinks worth preserving) or simply removing it and letting the 404 resolve naturally (if it has no external links and no traffic). Before retiring any post, check for cannibalization — an old post targeting the same keyword as a newer, stronger page may be actively suppressing the newer page’s performance. The content cannibalization post walks through how to diagnose whether two pages are competing and when consolidation produces better results than simple retirement.

The Update Process That Google Recognizes

Do this now: open Search Console, go to Performance, and sort by pages with the highest impressions but declining clicks over the last 6 months. Your top three declining pages are your immediate update candidates. Check each one: has a law changed, has a statistic gone stale, or has a competitor published a better version? The answer tells you whether the fix is an update, a rewrite, or a strategic redirect.

Google does not re-evaluate a page just because you changed the publish date. A meaningful update requires changes that Google’s crawlers can detect as substantively different from the previous version.

The elements that signal a genuine update: adding or revising at least 20% of the body content, updating the title tag if the current version no longer reflects the content accurately, refreshing the meta description, adding new sections that address questions the original post did not cover, replacing outdated statistics with current sourced data, and improving internal links to connect the post with content published since the original version.

The elements that do not signal a meaningful update: changing only the publish date, adding a single sentence at the bottom, swapping one image, or inserting a “last updated” tag without changing the underlying content.

Should the URL change during an update? No. Preserve the original URL to retain whatever backlinks and ranking history the page has accumulated. Should the publish date change? This is debated among practitioners. Updating the date to reflect the revision is common practice, and Google’s documentation does not penalize it when the content has genuinely changed. Changing the date without changing the content is a pattern Google has specifically warned against.

Handling Changed Laws and Superseded Rulings

Legal content has a unique update challenge: the law itself changes. A blog post about alimony calculation in Florida that was accurate when published may become misleading after a statutory amendment. The problem goes beyond SEO. Outdated legal information is a credibility and compliance problem.

When a law referenced in a post has changed, the update protocol is stricter than for general content refreshes. The attorney responsible for that practice area should review the post before republication. The post should explicitly acknowledge the change: “Note: Florida’s alimony statute was amended in [year]. This post has been updated to reflect current law.” This transparency serves both the reader and Google’s E-E-A-T evaluation, which assesses whether legal content is current and trustworthy. The E-E-A-T post explains how Google’s quality raters evaluate these trust signals for legal content — outdated legal claims directly undermine the trustworthiness dimension.

Posts referencing superseded case rulings need the same treatment. A criminal defense post citing a sentencing precedent that has been overturned must be corrected. Leaving it in place with outdated legal analysis does not just hurt SEO. It risks providing misleading legal information to readers who may act on it.

For firms with large content libraries, a practical safeguard is to tag every blog post that references specific statutes, rulings, or regulatory frameworks. When a legislative session ends or a significant ruling is issued, those tagged posts become the review queue. This is faster and more reliable than trying to remember which posts reference which laws.

Set the Review Cadence, Then Follow It

This only works if you actually do it on schedule. The cadence should match the content’s sensitivity to change.

Posts referencing specific laws, statutes, or regulations: review every six months or immediately when relevant legislation changes. These posts carry the highest risk of publishing outdated information, and for YMYL legal content, the consequence of getting it wrong extends beyond traffic loss.

Posts covering legal processes, costs, and timelines: review every six to twelve months. These elements shift with market conditions, court backlogs, and practice changes, but not as rapidly as statutory law.

Evergreen explainer content about general legal concepts: review every twelve to eighteen months. “What is negligence” changes slowly, but even fundamental legal explainers benefit from periodic refreshes to heading structure, internal links, and examples.

The operational framework: once per quarter, pull your top 20 blog posts by historical traffic from Search Console. Check each one against three criteria. Has the traffic declined more than 30% from its peak? Has any referenced law, statistic, or tool changed since the last review? Has a competitor published a substantially better version of the same topic? Posts that trigger any of these criteria go into the update queue. Posts that trigger none go back on the shelf until the next quarterly review.

Over twelve months, this process cycles through your entire content library and prevents the slow accumulation of outdated content that quietly damages your site’s authority. The blog calendar post explains how to build these update reviews into your editorial planning.

Content does not age gracefully. It ages silently, and the damage shows up in metrics you stopped checking.