Whenever you publish new content on your website, you notice that after some time, maybe months or years, it goes down on the search engine result pages (SERPs). This decline in ranking can negatively impact your website's SEO performance.
And if you notice further, you will see that newly published or updated content took your ranking place. Why is that? Is your content no longer helpful, or what?
Yes, you can say that your content is no longer helpful. Search engines like Google always appreciate content that stays evergreen, well-written, and up-to-date. That’s why refreshing old content can be a helpful and effective strategy to improve your website’s SEO performance.
So, in this article, we will discuss how you can enhance your website SEO by refreshing your old content.
How Can Refreshing Old Content Improve SEO Performance?
Now we are going to show you some steps that can help you improve your website SEO by refreshing old content, which further helps to increase search ranking.
Assessing the Current Performance
A content analysis of your existing content is important to identify areas that need improvement. By assessing the current performance, you can focus your efforts on refreshing the content that will have the most significant impact on your SEO performance. Here are the key steps to take:
Conduct A Content Audit:
To make analysis easier, create a thorough list of all the content on your website, such as blog posts, articles, landing pages, and other relevant pages. Afterward, categorize the content based on themes, topics, or categories.
Analyze Key Performance Metrics:
Review website analytics data to understand the traffic patterns, engagement metrics, and conversions associated with each piece of content. Then look for pages with low organic traffic, high bounce rates, or low average time on the page as potential candidates for refreshing.
Identify Underperforming Content:
Identify the content that is outdated or has become less valuable over time. Then look for content with outdated information, broken links, or a poor user experience. After that consider the potential of existing content that could be updated to align with current trends and technologies.
Prioritize Content for Refreshing:
Simply rank your content based on the combination of its current performance, relevance, and potential impact on your SEO goals. Try to focus on content that has the highest potential for improvement and aligns with your overall SEO and marketing strategies.
Update Your Keywords
After identifying the old blogs, now is the time to update and optimize them to improve SEO performance. The keyword targeting strategy is totally different in 2023 after recent Google Updates. You can’t artificially stuff keywords and phrases with the hope to get ranked higher in SERPs. If you had done that in your content, you need to update those pages immediately.
Moreover, keywords and trends keep changing over time. And there’s a possibility that the keywords that you used in your content a year ago are no longer in trend.
So, you need to assess the content and find keywords, relevant phrases, and variations as per modern trends. Use this updated list of keywords, phrases, and variations naturally in your content.
Update Outdated Information
Another reason why your content is no longer ranking on search engines is that the information you provided is outdated. With time, if you don’t update the information then search engines may notice that you're giving incorrect information to your audience. This will impact negatively your SEO ranking. Thus, always update the outdated content with the latest information.
Search engines (Google) favor fresh and relevant content, so updating old content with new information can help improve its visibility in search results. So, whenever you refresh your old content, update your stats with the latest information.
Ensure that it remains relevant and useful to your target audience, which as a result, increases user engagement and improves the overall user experience.
Now look at the above screenshot, where you will see a list of results against a search query. Though all the results provide you with information, which link will you click?
You will definitely open the link given at the last because it was updated on 09 April 2023 and offers the latest information. Other links would be getting impressions, but they won’t be getting more clicks.
Along with improved CTR, when you update your old information, you are also increasing the chances of getting backlinks and social shares. When you update old content with new and relevant information, it becomes more valuable to other websites and publishers who may link to it or share it on social media.
This can help increase the authority and credibility of your website, which can further improve SEO.
Focus on the Content Readability
Readability is an important factor that greatly affects your rankings on search engines. It pertains to the level of ease your readers experience in understanding your written content.
If a blog post's language is too complex to understand, you're likely to leave it and spend more time on a post that's easier to comprehend and provides the information you need.
You can see how the readability factor improves user engagement and that’s what Google values now. As per recent updates, Google clearly gives value to the pages which have better engagement and better readability.
If your blog post or page has useful and latest information but you failed to make it easy to understand by a layman, then the user may not engage and bounce.
Identify any pages from your initial list that have readability issues and then reword or rephrase them to enhance their comprehensibility. Doing this yourself can be a time-consuming and hectic task. You can do this automatically simply by taking help from online AI tools to paraphrase text.
A paraphrasing tool uses NLP technology to understand the context and paraphrase the content in more human-like language. The tool makes the text more readable and understandable by replacing difficult terms with simpler ones.
There are hundreds of such paraphrasing tools but most of them are premium tools. You can use these AI tools to make your content more readable and hence more SEO-friendly.
Conclusion
So, here we are with a demanded question about how to improve SEO performance by refreshing old content. In refreshing your old content, you first have to find old blogs, update keywords, update the title and meta description, and improve its readability.
