Refreshing Content and Updating SEO: Converting Aging Content Into New Visitors
Content is crucial in terms of driving traffic to a website. New content—in the form of blogs, service pages, landing pages, product reviews, and more—helps drive SEO and customer traffic by increasing page rankings. It gives businesses the chance to capitalize on something newsworthy, a trend, or explain their approach to a service that’s in demand.
Content and search engine optimization (SEO) are how companies drive traffic to their websites. And sometimes, you may stumble into a hit piece of writing that pushes new visitors to your website for months or even years. But over time, it may become less effective or outdated.
Refreshing content, especially if it’s some of your best written or most effective, can be a relatively easy way to drive traffic to the older pages of your website.
What Is Refreshing Content?
Refreshing content on an old page means updating it, adding to it, and reoptimizing it. If you have a website and keep track of what’s working versus what’s not, you’ll likely notice when a certain page drives more organic traffic, especially over a long period of time. Often, what ends up happening is, over the long haul, traffic decreases from that page.
But the good news is that a piece of content can still be rescued, reused, and refreshed. Here’s how to refresh content:
Add new details:
Is there an updated or new version of the product, service, or topic since you first wrote the piece? Or, is it part of a new trend among online influencers? Refreshing your content with any new details about the product or service is a good place to start.
Recent sources:
Has your product or service been in the news lately? Find those sources, credit them, and quote what they’ve said about your product or service. Adding these sources will improve your Google E-E-A-T score.
Include new data:
Was there a recent study that puts your product in a new light? Or, has there been a large adoption rate since publishing? Adding anything that paints your services or products positively helps convince the reader they too should buy it.
Improving SEO:
Do fresh keyword research and see what’s trending currently. Go back into old content and optimize it with the most relevant and highest ranking keywords, which should help it move higher in Google’s SERP (search engine results page).
“the good news is that a piece of content can still be rescued, reused, and refreshed”
Keep in mind that you need to significantly update the content for Google to consider it as “fresh” and therefore boost it in the SERP rankings. Google themselves expressly warn against trying to trick the search engine to think content is fresh. They advise creating “people-first” content rather than search engine-first; refreshing content is all about adding value to readers in terms of experience and expertise, knowing who your audience is, and leaving them satisfied with the information provided.
Why Refresh Content?
Refreshing content is squeezing the most out of something you know has worked in the past, plus it means you’re not starting from scratch. Any business, content creator, or digital marketing expert will naturally be paying close attention to traffic results on their website pages. That’s because many folks are results oriented, and if you are, you’ll likely notice a “whale.” That’s when a ton of traffic is coming into your site thanks to that whale—it may even be overshadowing every other piece of content.
Once you land a whale, you’ll want to milk it for all it’s got. And you’ll probably also explore the format—the voice, tone, paragraph structure, bullet points—in order to find a way to replicate that success in future pieces.
Refreshing content—when done well—can bring that whale back to life. It’s a way to get the most out of all the hard work you originally put into the piece, and keep positive momentum going in terms of traffic.
And another reason to refresh content on your old pages is to adapt to changing interests of consumers and readers. You may have written why Twitter is a perfect place to grow your business back in 2018, and as trends have changed, you may be able to refresh that content to apply more broadly to social media. Or even choose different, newer, more effective platforms.
Our world is ever-changing, and people are both used to and seek out the latest information when possible. Refreshing content plays into that media ecosystem we’ve all grown accustomed to.
SharpNet Solutions Can Create New Content or Refresh Existing Content for You
The content team at SharpNet Solutions is composed of a group of digital marketing professionals who remain on the cutting edge of content marketing and SEO best practices. We write hundreds of pages of new content every month for our direct clients and white label partners. We can create blogs, service pages, or landing pages for you with proven results.
We can also refresh old content with SEO or additional words, which is a more specialized service we provide to any clients who would benefit from this strategy. Our team can take your old blog post, update it with new and relevant information and statistics, add catchy calls to action, and even reoptimize it with higher ranking keywords. Another option is allowing our SEO team to simply update your website’s optimization if your content is still relevant and fresh.
Whether you’re looking for new or refreshed content, SharpNet Solutions can work with you to design the most effective SEO strategy tailored to your marketing goals. Reach out to us today to request more information! No business is too big or too small to benefit from our content marketing and SEO expertise.