Semalt Explains How To Identify And Refresh Outdated Content
Every blogger knows that a tried-and-true way to be successful with a blog is to keep coming up with new content regularly. But as you add more content, your old work gets buried deeper in the archives.
If you post content often, traffic to new posts may make up for or even replace traffic to older posts, making it hard to figure out what's wrong.
Leaving old articles without updating them can lead to content decay. This happens when articles become lost in traffic. One way to make sure your content doesn't become outdated is to create "evergreen" content and keep your blog or website up-to-date.
At Semalt, we can help you find articles that are out of date and show you how to fix them. We are a full-fledged SEO company, and we do everything from link-building to content management.
If you ever need our service or just want to talk about your website, please reach out to us here for a free consultation.
Why Is Updating Old Content Important?
There are several reasons why bringing back old, dead content is a good idea. They are
1. Maintain Consistent SEO Ranking
Google only shows people content they think is important to them, so outdated content isn't one of those things. Google always gives more weight to new content, so the more often you update it, the more likely your SEO efforts will be noticed.
2. Create New And Helpful Content
Updating your old content means you'll have fresh content on your blog or website. These fresh contents contain new information, like facts and guidelines, that can give your content more depth and credibility.
3. Generate Higher Clicks
Updating an article could mean that you get to have a new date attached to the article. Most people are attracted to content with a fresher date because they believe content with a newer date has more recent information. For this reason, updated articles can generate more clicks than if their dates are very old.
4. Improves User experience
One obvious reason is that you want every page of your site to be a good landing page for visitors: Bounces are likely to happen when you have old content or broken links. This results in leads and clients that get lost.
How To Identify Outdated Content
You can identify outdated content through the following ways:
1. Traffic Loss
Tracking all rankings for your site(s) with a large number of pages and content may be difficult. Regular page-level traffic audits can help you find an article that might be outdated.
Google Analytics is a good way to find pages with fewer clicks from organic searches. All you have to do is restrict your acquisition channels to "organic search," click through to the "Landing Pages" tab, and use the "Compare" checkbox when choosing dates.
When comparing, choose similar days of the week since traffic could be lower on the weekends and higher on other days. You can also compare one month to the next to find longer-term losses.
Search Console can also be used to find pages that are losing traffic. Search Console allows you to sort your pages based on which ones received the most clicks. This is a good way to find your biggest losses.
It is also a good idea to monitor your competitors' key pages so that you'll know when they're updated. Visual Ping is a useful tool for this because it lets you keep an eye on your competitors' on-page SEO efforts and alerts you when anything changes on their sites.
2. Loss Of Rank
There may be more than one reason why a page's rank drops, but for content-based pages, it's usually because the content is out of date. Check your target SERP to see if a more recent page ranks higher than yours.
You can use SE Ranking to look at how your rankings change for new keywords that you aren't keeping track of.
In addition, the tool has a useful SERP analytics feature that lets you see how changes in organic search results happen over time. It's a great way to figure out how flexible a SERP is and how frequently you need to update your target page to keep up.
3. Link Equity
The idea behind this is that if a page has a lot of natural links but no organic traffic, it's likely because of one of two things: It used to rank back in the day, or It's not set up for any search terms (and Google has trouble matching it to any)
In both cases, updating and re-optimizing a page could help it get more clicks and rankings. Also, if you notice that links to one of your articles are slowly fading, it may be because your content is very old and the editors have started removing the links.
Link checker is a simple tool for tracking backlinks that will assist you in catching that bad trend in time.
How to Refresh outdated content
1. Use Follow-ups To Old Posts
If you'd rather extend the life of an older post with a high rank rather than constantly dishing out new content, you can turn it into a series or two-part post.
Follow-up content helps you do justice to a complicated topic, shows what's new, brings back readers of the first post, attracts new readers, and so on. Don't forget to mention the original title of the first post and add a link back to the original article.
2. Target Newer Keywords To Improve The Ranking
You probably have many old posts on your site that you could update and make fresh. Once you've chosen the blog post or content you want to change, find out which keywords it ranks for already. If it's old, try going after newer and some secondary keywords to get it to rank.
3. Eliminate Broken Links
To make old content more useful, look for broken or dead links and get rid of them. Not only do they make it hard for people to use your site, but they also tell search engines that your site isn't very good. Every part has to work and do what it's supposed to do.
That's how things work. If you don't do that, your content will immediately rank lower because search engines will see it as old, outdated, and not authoritative. Also, with dozens of pages and sub-pages, it can be a lot of work to check each link individually to see if it works.
A lot of tools that can help you check for broken links and find them quickly exist. Dead link checker, Broken link checker, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider are some examples. If you have difficulty checking for broken links, Semalt can help you identify and fix them.
4. Add Significant Information
Google won't say how much information is significant, so you'll have to use your judgment as an editor.
Here are a few options to help you get started:
- Include recent statistics, dates or numbers.
- Update your images, screenshots and videos to newer ones.
- Add new trends and events that can be influential to the content of the article.
5. Change The Style Of Your Content
If you have an old page or post that used to get you a lot of traffic and engagement, It means that people already like it. You only need to make it more interesting and change how the information is presented.
For example, you can turn a blog post into a Vlog or infographic, an eBook into a series of blog posts, a podcast or video into a blog post, and so on. There are no limits to what can be done.
6. Make Use Of Social Media
Social media is a useful tool that can influence more people to visit your website and spread the word about your brand. Putting your content on Twitter, Instagram, etc., in smaller pieces like stats, quotes, teasers, summaries, images, and bullet points is a good idea for many reasons.
First, you don't have to worry about coming up with new post ideas. If a post did well in the past, you could make it happen again. Second, you can get people to visit your website by giving them a reason to do so.
What Articles Need Updating?
Not all of your old content will be able to make it. Also, it would be a Herculean task to keep them all up to date. Doing a content audit can reveal how well your posts are doing and then put the most important ones at the top of the list for updating.
There are many tools, such as Screaming frog and Aherfs, that can help you perform a content audit. You can also use an SEO company like Semalt for your content audits.
These audits can assist in identifying the best content that needs to be updated. Some of them are:
1. Time-sensitive Contents
These are stats, trends, industry reports, and other content with a "metaphorical" expiration date. These are articles like "Top Rappers in 2022" or "The Best Comedy Movies in 2022," which you get to change yearly.
2. Contents With The Same Keywords
If you have two or more articles with the same keywords, you are simply competing with yourself in terms of SEO. Make sure to update old content like this by changing the keywords for which the posts are ranking or by combining them.
3. High-performing Contents
Have you ever written something that went viral and got a lot of shares? They need to be fixed up. If people liked them before, you could get their attention again by making them better.
4. Evergreen Contents
These are contents that your readers will find useful and interesting long after they have been published. Evergreen content includes guides, how-to articles, tips, frequently asked questions, etc.
Final Words
If you've been creating content for a while, you probably have a lot of older posts that aren't getting you the results you want. Instead of letting them sit in your archives and get old, Semalt can help you identify outdated posts and upgrade them to boost your rank.
Semalt is one of the best SEO companies, and their services are sure to help your business grow and attract the right customers. Contact us today.