Google’s mission is to “organize the world information and make it universally accessible and useful”. As of now, Google has a stock of over 130 trillion pages, but all of them do not get visibility and ranking because they are no longer helpful. The reason for this is that many websites do not update themselves with the ever-changing policy or guidelines of Google.
Writing new content for your website requires a lot of effort and is time-consuming. Deep research & knowledge of the topic are of utmost importance and also do not guarantee ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs) every time. Most website owners focus on creating more and more content and put all efforts into ranking on search results pages. But what about the previously written content? Are they still relevant and helpful for the readers? Becoming a specialist in content writing requires an in-depth knowledge of the topic; however, after a few years, it becomes outdated, which lowers its relevance & effectiveness. This is where refreshing your content is of supreme importance.
Users wish to have content with the latest news updates, sync with the marketing trends, etc. The updated content keeps the user's interest engaged and increases their chances of taking the intended action. The Google ranking algorithm does not provide visibility to outdated content. In this case, there is a general question in every website owner's mind; do we have to write new content again and again for the same topic? Or was the whole effort & time in writing content wasted? But it's not like that and you do not need to write new content every time. This is the same topic we are going to discuss in this blog. How you can update old content to promote it as a new one so that it can boost your website ranking? We also try to understand why it is necessary to refresh old content?
Why the need to update old content?
Updating your old content is an effective SEO ranking strategy in which you can not only give a fresh touch to your old blogs but also republish and repromote it as the new ones. With this effective content marketing strategy, you can save your time & effort in writing new content for the same topic every time. It also helps boost ranking and take an advantage over your competitors. Google, as well as users, prefer this type of approach. It would be best if you regularly worked to update old content as it uplifts your Google ranking in a very short time compared to newly written content.
• Increase website’s organic traffic - The traffic on the website is the number of visitors that clicks and explore your site. Organic traffic mostly depends on your website ranking; other factors that influence your traffic include the title tag, call-to-action, SEO-friendly meta description, URL, content on the website, etc. As shown in the graph above, the freshness and quality of the content degrade with time. The Google ranking algorithm prioritizes optimized content. If you refresh content on your site, the chances of website ranking are high. A high clickthrough rate means more traffic to your website, strengthening your SEO campaign. It means that there is more visibility for your website and readers also visit you more frequently, which ultimately increases your website’s authenticity and CTR.
• Deliver faster results - Every time writing a new blog or article is not worthwhile rather than optimizing your old content can be more functional. Suppose you have content written a few years ago, then surely there must have been some traffic on it. If you start working on a new blog, you start from scratch, which resets all progress and traffic on the content. Therefore, optimizing your old blogs is a better and more effective SEO strategy that requires less work & time and provides better results. Also, the engagement rate on old optimized content is often better than the newly written one. This content marketing strategy helps meet your website goals faster than starting from the new one.
• Repromotion of content - One of the main benefits of refreshing content is that you can repromote and republish the article again and again whenever you rework them. Old content is not preferable to users and search engines both, especially those associated with data or stats. Thus, it would be better to update old content with numbers more often than any other document as it changes frequently.
Simply adding recent data to your old blog, adding more links & sections, performing changes to the title and other necessary modifications can serve it as a new blog. You can repromote it as a fresh article with the help of an e-mail newsletter and social media sites by sharing links with others. Always change the date of the blog every time you update it to let Google know that this content is updated. It is essential that your blog post has URLs to social handles so that users can easily share it; you can also ask for comments on your blog that improves user engagement.
• SEO ranking benefits - Google’s vision is to deliver the most relevant and reliable information available across the internet. Google crawlers are continuously crawling the whole internet to find these types of content, but there is a frequency in crawling web pages. Crawlers do not crawl the old website or pages frequently. This is why old pages slowly lose their ranking in the SERPs. With all the factors remaining the same, the Google search algorithm prioritizes sites that update their content frequently. Refresh content has become one of the factors Google uses to determine the website’s authority and ranking. Create content that is relevant and user-friendly, which automatically boosts your organic CTR and hence helps in improving website ranking.
• Revives the old content - With time the blog content gets obsolete, especially the data given in the blog changes quite frequently. Updating the old content is a good opportunity to give your content a new life by contemporizing it with the current PPC trends or SEO trends and fixing the mistakes made while writing or publishing the original blog. Check for any formatting issues, irregular font, punctuation, or any other problem and fix them immediately. You can optimize & add more images, videos and audio to the old blog to make it more interactive for the readers.
You can consider changing the meta description and CTA of your content to make it more appealing so that it can grab users' attention. Select two or more meta descriptions & CTA, apply them for a certain time, and analyze the stats to get more clicks. You can also experiment with meta description and CTA that works best for your blog in getting more traffic, increasing the impression share, etc.
There are two possibilities while updating the content: first, revise the old blog and second, remove the whole blog. It is a crucial decision as removing the blog which requires updation may harm your SEO ranking or vice versa.
Strategies to make your old content effective
• Avoid spelling & grammatical mistakes - Spelling and grammar mistakes are the most common errors that degrade the user experience. Try to avoid these mistakes while writing your content and fixing them in the old blogs, if any. There are various spelling and grammar mistake correction tools or features available that you can use to proofread your writings. Grammarly.com is a good tool that you can use. It is a tool available both with the free and paid features to make your writing more effective. Microsoft Word and Google Docs have a built-in feature that finds and fixes your spelling and grammatical mistakes, which is very helpful in your content writing.
• Fix broken backlinks issues - Linking facts, data, news and any statement from an authorized website, expert, or directly from Google is a good practice that enhances your SEO ranking. But as the content becomes old, it meets with several errors in which 404 errors are common that need to be fixed immediately. Fixing broken backlinks issues or adding fresh links to new resources is an ongoing process that you should practice to boost ranking on SERPs.
External or internal linking is a vital part of your content marketing strategy that enhances the website's authenticity as it works as a piece of evidence for the provided information. The URL of the websites keeps changing; that's why it becomes necessary to avoid these issues by linking to new resources but do not link to any spammy, irrelevant websites as it hurts your website ranking. Also, find and fix broken backlinks issues with the help of the free SEO tools like Ahrefs tool, Screaming frog, etc.; Broken Link Checker can also be used, which is easily available as a Google Chrome extension.
• Keep your content engaging - Attracting the user's attention is the primary task for any content creator with the help of impactful meta descriptions, titles, URLs and call-to-action. Once users click on your website and start reading the blog, you should take care that they do not feel bored reading the content. To avoid such issues, create informative content using interactive multimedia options. If you do not optimize your old content, you can add interactive images, videos, audio, infographics, etc., so that users do not leave your blog while reading.
• Keep an eye on recent technology changes - Updating your content is a good strategy, but it should be updated with the recent search engine algorithm updates to get the best possible website ranking. On average, Google releases around 500-600 algorithmic updates in a year, so you should know these updates and try to refresh content according to the specified guidelines. If you regularly work on your content optimization strategy, your job will be easy; otherwise, you will have to do more work in one go as the work will stack up. If you want to maximize Google's ranking advantages to stay ahead of your competitors, you should ensure that all your old articles match the best SEO practices to stay in the competition.
• Make noticeable changes - According to Moz, the number of changes is also noticed to determine the freshness of the content. Just changing or updating a line, adding some new links, or any minor corrections is not a good idea as it may be ignored by Google and not count in fresh content. Thus, you should thoroughly read the document and make changes wherever necessary. For any new updates related to the topic of your blog, writing a new section using SEO keywords is preferable rather than deleting the old paragraph. In some cases, the paragraph with no useful information or irrelevant discussion can be removed from your documents. Adding new links to the relevant anchor texts is also a sign of optimized content, but tricking the search engines may not be a good idea as it may lead to loss of credibility, search engine penalties and much more.
Some quick tips to make your content optimization strategy effective
1. Modernizing your content is a continuous practice, but you can consider adding or removing specific paragraphs or lines that can work better, as updating the whole document every time is unnecessary. Always think twice before deleting any piece of information or the entire blog.
2. Never update your recently written blog or content even if you are not getting the expected results because pages take time to appear in search results and attract CTR; rather, you can consider updating the meta descriptions and CTAs.
3. It is better not to discuss any topic than to give wrong or misleading information as it can significantly harm your website ranking. Try to maintain the uniqueness of your website by avoiding duplicate content as it is counted in black hat SEO practice and can result in legal actions by Google.
4. Firstly, analyze the top-ranking pages for the topic of your blog and find out what implementations you can do, and then create content according to them to gain a high Google ranking position.
5. Writing evergreen content is a good idea rather than time-critical blogs. For example, a blog on digital marketing strategies works best for you rather than writing a blog on the topic of digital marketing in times of the coronavirus.
6. While updating your content, you need to be entirely sure to target your SEO keywords. Do some keyword research to find the common search terms related to your topic and use them while refreshing your old content.
Conclusion
The main purpose of updating old content is to maintain its freshness and not waste your efforts writing new content again and again on the same topic. To boost your online presence and increase users' trust in your website, you need to refresh content regularly as it acts as a sign that you are active and focus on providing the users with updated knowledge. But still, there are many cases in which the Google ranking algorithm displays old content for a searched query because Google provides its audience with the most relevant and accurate piece of information, but updated content has its exceptional benefits.
Refreshing the content on the website does not mean that you do not write new content; you should regularly create content for your website. You must be careful about choosing which content you have to update because editing the content is not always the best idea. Only consider updating old content when some sections, data, features, services, etc., are outdated as the obsolete information ruins the user experience. Always try to answer the questions to users' queries through your writings. Create content using SEO keywords that can significantly boost your website's ranking and provide maximum visibility. You can also consult an SEO company or expert that provides content marketing services to optimize your content in the best way possible.
References:
• Why Should You Update Your Old Content?
• How & Why You Must Improve or Remove Your Old Content
• How to Give Your Old Content a Face Lift to Bring Rankings Back from the Dead
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