Why updating old content helps with SEO
Have you noticed that new content increases your traffic and SEO?
Google’s algorithm seeks to provide its users with fresh and relevant content. While most people are focused on creating new content, yet, updating old content could have the same effect.
Creating new content can be complicated and takes a lot of time and resources. The effectiveness of your content SEO decreases over time, as shown in this illustration from Moz. Updating old content can also increase your SEO and also your website authority.
How to spot what old content you need to update?
There are a couple of ways you can spot old content like how old the page is, a drop in page traffic, new information on your topic.
Page age
How old is your page? A couple of months? A year? Longer? Page age can be the first point of attack for spotting what pages you should updating.
Starting with your older pages, you can go through the content and analyse if the page needs to be updated. There may be some new SEO strategies or design changes that you might want to put in place.
Page traffic
Another easy to spot whether updating your content may be needed is through page traffic. Over time your page may become stale in Google’s eyes. Content maturity happens in four stages, the introduction or initial post, growth, maturity, and decline.
The first time you publish something new, this is the introduction phase. The growth stage will show an increase in traffic over time. The peak of your traffic is the maturity stage, and once traffic starts to drop, you will see the decline stage.
Topic information
Over time your content topic may become irrelevant or include inaccurate data. That is why it is good practice to go over your older content and refresh it.
Why content decay occurs?
Why content decay occurs?Google’s never-ending method of providing its users with the most relevant information causes changes in page rankings. By understanding what Google wants, it can help you decide what content you need to refresh. Content decay will always occur, so giving users fresh and the best content will keep your website on top of the search engines.
9 Tips for updating old content to help with SEO
Here are 9 tips to follow to update your old content for SEO:
#1. Check your analytics. Analytics is the first step to collecting the right data to know your metrics. Here you will find page impressions, clicks, click-through ratio, average position, sessions, bounce rate/page sessions and much more. It is crucial to understand all the metrics involved to find what content needs attention. In the previous “Why old content hurts your website” blog article, we were also mentioning that checking the analytics and refreshing your content should be the first things to do to refresh old content. 
#2. Using the information above, find the pages that will be your focus. Some extra things to look out for are high traffic but low conversion pages, low traffic with high conversions and once-popular content.
#3. Check your keyword research. Going through your keyword research is one of the most critical parts of updating your content.
Your keyword or phrase might have been performing well at one stage yet not receive too many clicks today.
#4. Research search intent. This step is crucial in understanding what potential users may be wanting from your content. Optimising for search intent ensures that the user finds what they are looking for, and this is not only important for the users but Google as well.
#5. Improve your titles. The power of a great title alone has the potential to get the attention of a user.
Another aspect is to incorporate powerful SEO into your title to be keyword reach.
#6. Refresh content. We finally come to the part of actually fixing your content.
You can check for any spelling or grammar mistakes, internal links or any broken links.
A good practice is also updating the data to become more accurate or add popular new methods. Fresh visuals also make a huge difference, and this is where you can set yourself apart from the competition.
#7. Optimise On-page SEO. Your on-page SEO is also a great way to improve your rankings. It involves checking your main keywords in your title, URL, headings, meta descriptions and making sure your images are optimised.
#8. Review your CTA (call to action), whether it may be a banner or contact button.
Your CTA links back to your search intent, and knowing what your users are looking for will make it easier to create a powerful CTA.
#9. Update your Page/Post date. Once you finished with all your changes, now you can change your postdate. This simple method lets Google know that your page is updated.
Conclusion
In conclusion, content decay will eventually catch up to your pages or posts. Google seeks to give its users up-to-date information on their searches. Therefore, updating your old content can help boost your rankings and keep your traffic consistent.
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