It may surprise you to know that Google loves fresh content just as much as we all love freshly baked choc-chip cookies! If your content has gone a bit stale, it may be time for a content refresh. Old content may not necessarily be ready for the bin. With just a few tweaks here and there, you could revive an old blog post or certain web pages to enjoy a boost to your SEO.
How Does My Content Affect SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s visibility on search engines, such as Google. When people search for a product or service online, algorithms scan the internet to call up the most relevant and trustworthy sources, which will be displayed first on the search results page (SERP).
If you want to get on that first page, your website must have certain factors that give it a high SEO ranking, such as keywords that match the search, high-quality content, images, videos and functionality. With trillions of online searches happening every year, this can be a primary source of website traffic, which is why updating your content is essential.
How To Refresh Content For SEO
Let’s go through a list of ways you can add value to your content to raise your SEO rankings. You may not have to apply all of these elements to your website, but use this guide as a springboard and do what works best for your site.
1. Review Analytics
Your website analytics data is useful in identifying what’s working well. Make good use of this data to review your existing content to see which blog posts or pages are getting traffic but could do better. You could also look for old blog posts that were popular. These would all be ideal candidates for updating. Keep a bulleted list of all the pages of posts you want to go back to and refresh.
2. Fine-tune Your Content
With your list in hand, you’re all set to start combing through your content, looking out for anything that is outdated, such as statistics. Carefully read each page of your website and the blog posts you’ve earmarked for updating, and refine the content to give it a fresh appeal. Make the stories and examples contemporary, fix broken links and remove any old news or events.
3. Add New Content
Adding new content may not mean writing a new page, or creating new blog posts. A content refresh means looking through existing pages and deciding what can be done to give them a fresh spin to boost your SEO. For example, you may have written about an old technology that has recently been upgraded, so you could share this new information with your readers. It may involve rewriting or adding a paragraph or two.
4. Add Images/Video
This step is extremely useful for websites that did not include multimedia when they were created. You may find that your old blog posts had poor-quality pictures or none at all. This is a great opportunity to make your content stand out with engaging images, graphs, infographics and videos that will add value for visitors and encourage them to stay on your site longer. The longer people stay, the higher the chance you have of generating new leads or sales. Websites with media are also favoured by algorithms and will rank higher.
5. Internal Links
Internal links keep viewers on your site for longer periods of time, getting them to engage in a more meaningful way and moving them closer to the bottom of the sales funnel. SEO is all about matching searcher intent, and by using internal links in your blog posts or on each page of your website, you help to answer the questions that people are searching for. So, for example, if you have a blog post that talks about a service you offer, make sure you link to the service page of your website.
6. Promote Your Updated Content
Once your content has been updated, don’t forget to promote it online as much as you would any new content, whether that means tweeting, emailing, or sharing in posts and stories. If it performed well before, it will perform much better now that it’s more relevant, so go ahead and let your readers know about it!
You can also refresh your title tags and meta descriptions to better signal to search engines that your content is worth viewing. If you find this part of the process too technical, get a professional website company to help you.
WebFoundations can help you update your existing content for more effective SEO. We’ll implement expert strategies like the ones mentioned above, along with a few others, to refresh your amazing content and get you noticed by the right people in the search results. Get in touch with us today.
