Revitalize Your Marketing

If you want your website to rank on search engines, you need to have a helpful and effective content engine. Already have some great content on your site? That’s all well and good, but none of it will last forever. Even the best content has a use-by date. Trends change, algorithms change, and your audience’s expectations change.

Rather than letting old content waste away over time, it behooves you to update it systematically. Users love to consume content that is fresh, new, and relevant. By extension, search engines want to see the same. After all, it’s the job of the search engine to qualify the most relevant content for user queries. With those two factors to consider, you ought to enliven your content periodically to keep it ranking high.

Why Refreshing Old Content Works

Search engines crave fresh and relevant content. You can reach a wider or even new audience and make your message relevant to today’s readers. Best of all, updating existing content is a cost-effective way to get more out of the resources you’ve already invested in.

Updating old content is more than just a quick edit of a few lines and then republishing. It requires identifying passages and data points in your content that need to be adjusted to reflect current trends and truths. When done thoroughly, search engines will deem your content more appropriate based on the timeliness of certain queries.

Step 1: Audit Your Existing Content

The first step to a content refresh is taking a look at your existing content. This involves cataloging your content and assessing its performance. Use tools like Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to see which pieces are high-performing and just need a tweak. You can also note which ones are underperforming but have potential and which are old and need a more comprehensive update. A data-driven content audit will allow you to focus your efforts on the pieces that will deliver the most results and ensure that your time and resources are being used effectively.

Step 2: Cluster Your Content

As part of your refresh strategy, you should organize your materials into content clusters.

These groupings revolve around a central topic, often referred to as a pillar, that is supported by multiple related pieces of content. This interconnected structure improves the user experience and signals topical authority to search engines.

For example, if your website is about digital marketing, you could have a pillar page on “Content Marketing Strategies” and link to cluster articles on “Creating High Impact Blogs,” “Video Marketing Trends,” and “Repurposing Content.” Linking these pieces together creates an ecosystem of content that drives traffic and strengthens your website’s overall authority.

Step 3: Prune Old Content

Part of vetting your existing content involves removing stale content that, frankly, isn’t worth updating at all. On the one hand, you might think it’s harmless to leave older content on your site, even if it’s fallen out of vogue. But there’s more to it than that.

Search engines assess the entire topical hierarchy of your website when deciding which page to rank in the SERP. When a chunk of your content is made up of irrelevant content that’s outdated or no longer pertinent, it will weigh down all of your content in the eyes of the algorithm. The remedy in this case is to minimize the quantity of pages on your site that dilute your domain’s topical authority.

Think of it this way. If you have 100 pages on your site and only ten of them cover a specific topic, search engines will assign only 10% of your domain to that topic. Now, if your site had only 50 pages, the ten topical pages withstanding, then 20% of your content will be assigned to that topic. That will help search engines match your domain to more searches of a particular type.

There are many more moving parts to it than the above example. However, the logic to follow is to trim down old content to ensure the remaining material is focused on your core areas of expertise.

Step 4: Consolidate Your Content

In the same vein of pruning your content, you may also detect redundancies in your content that can be combined. You should comb through your existing content and identify opportunities for some pages to be merged together, which will decrease the overall quantity of pages on your site while also preserving the topical authority of your most meaningful content.

You can do this systematically by comparing multiple similar pages and extracting the parts of them that are unique from each other. From there, you can consolidate them into one piece, removing the others.

Consolidating content signals to search engines that you’re enhancing user experience by providing more comprehensive and useful information in a single location. This approach improves SEO performance and makes it easier for users to find the information they’re seeking.

Step 5: Enhance the User Experience

Refreshing content isn’t just about SEO. It’s also about the user experience. Readers will engage more with well-structured, visually appealing content. Break up long blocks of text, add subheadings for readability, and add updated visuals or multimedia elements like videos or infographics. If the original piece had data or statistics, make sure they’re up to date and sourced from credible sources.

The bottom line here is making your content more EEAT-friendly. What is EEAT? It stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These components all work together to help search engines qualify your content as the best match for a user’s query.

Step 6: Measure the Impact of Your Updates

A content refresh doesn’t stop at the refresh itself. Weighing the impact of your efforts is key to amplifying your efforts, spotting what is working and what isn’t.

Use Google Analytics to monitor changes in traffic, engagement, and conversions for your refreshed content. Look at how the updates are impacting rankings and whether they are in line with your goals. For pieces that aren’t performing as expected, assess whether additional tweaks are worth it, or whether or not you should remove them entirely.

Be Consistent and Update Often

Consistency in your content refreshes will yield long-term results. Making content updates a regular part of your strategy can serve toward making your content more dynamic and authoritative. Consider creating a schedule for regular reviews of your top-performing and evergreen content and identifying opportunities for updates.

Refreshing old content is a powerful, yet tragically underused tactic that will deliver big results. If you dedicate resources toward optimizing existing content, you’ll more than likely see sizable upticks in your organic SEO performance before long.