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Why you should consider refreshing old content
Your website content ages like a fine wine...for a while. When your search results tank, don't immediately reach for new content. Try refreshing old posts instead!
John McCoy
July 07, 2023
Why you should consider refreshing old content
So, there’s always kind of a push to create new content. New content, new content, new content.
Don’t get me wrong; new content has its place. You need more content if your website has only three or four pages. Google will only index those four pages, and you’ll never get any traction from those.
But if you’ve been at it for a while and you have dozens or hundreds, it might be a good time to go ahead and look through your archives of content and see if you have any room to improve old, underperforming content.
Case study: Dirt Legal
What are my longest-standing clients is also my largest client. I’ve been waiting for them for two years now, and I have over 100 published articles, but they have several hundred articles before me.
The company has become so successful that they can’t take on any new work until they expand their staff, so we won’t try to keep creating fresh contact to draw in traffic that way.
Example of an article that’s five years old. It’s getting no views, but the topic is evergreen, so we’re going to refresh it.
The Dirt Legal blog has posts going all the way back to early 2018. Some of these still do extraordinarily well, averaging over 1,000 monthly hits, but some are only 10 to 20, and quite a few are averaging zero.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, deleting them, and pushing new content, we will try something different. I’ve been going through them for the past few weeks and identifying key deficiencies in them.
Deficiencies in the structure. Deficiencies and backlinks in interlinking and generally looking for new opportunities in old content.
What is “refreshing content”?
Oh, what exactly does refreshing content entail?
There are dozens of factors that impact the overall SEO value of a piece of content. You will look for the items in your old work that are not optimized for search engine efficiency.
These are keywords, headings, structure, and a lot of other things.
How can you find out what’s lacking?
First, use either the Brave browser or Google Chrome, depending on your preference. There are a couple of SEO extensions that you need to add immediately.
SEOQuake: SEOquake is part of SEMrush, and it gives you all kinds of valuable information on the overall diagnostics and structure of any website or any webpage that you want.
Ahrefs: I like this one it’s not as good as SEOQuake and covers lotta the same stuff, but it’s still very valuable. It’s a free extension, so just add it.
SEOQuake in action. I’m addressing the Meta description and headings.
The diagnostics tab on SEO Quake is going to be one of your best friends. You’re gonna look at the overall structure of your HTML tags, which are your headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.).
You need to have only one H1 HTML tag. Using more than one can seriously diminish your SEO visibility. Your H2 headings are going to be what is basically the content outline.
Okay, now what?
Google is pretty smart. You’re not going Just to swap out a year in the title (i.e., 2023 from 2020) and call it a day.
The content itself needs to reflect that significant changes have been made.
So what you’re gonna need to do, is go through your work, and make sure that it actually reflects significant changes, but the basic bare-bones of it can remain the same. The theme will be the same, and most of the content will be the same, but you need to go through and make sure all of your links are good.
I really like the Chrome extension SEOQuake, because it shows you a lot of the detailed analytics that you need to know to see how Google or other search engines are looking at your content.
Namely, it looks at it, and it’ll let you know your title length, how your metas are, and other pertinent information that search engines look at when crawling and indexing.
Make sure it sounds like a human wrote it!
This is the most important tip of all. We have all heard about AI non-stop for a few months now, and guess what? It didn’t take over much of anything.
I’m no expert, but from what I’ve seen I don’t think I’m at any risk of losing my job to AI bros.
AI sounds like what it is: a computer-generated text.
Write your own content, kids. I’m not going to tell you how to do what you do, but copy pasta from ChatGPT will get you canned. Be authentically you.
SEO Tips of The Week
My tips this week is easy: pick one of the major companies in the SEO scene (Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or even the Google Search Central blog), and go through their blog for the week. Challenge yourself to read at least ten articles.
It doesn’t matter what topic you choose, just start reading about it. This will put you in the top 10% of content creators. That’s all it takes to be considered a subject matter expert. Just a little bit of effort on your part. The information is 100% free. All it takes is a little bit of work on your part. That’s it.
Get started with a few of these:
Just pick one of those, and start reading through their archive of articles. Take action now.
Resources & Recommended Reading
You’re going to find it necessary to audit your website from time to time. This handy guide from Ahrefs will show you the steps necessary to start on this and at least identify glaring deficiencies.
