How to Keep Old Content Fresh

There’s no doubting that the importance of keeping your website content fresh, in order to remain relevant, is a crucial part of any marketing plan. However, ensuring older content is still relevant is equally as important and should be up to date and improved wherever possible.

Updating, re-formatting or re-purposing older content enables you to then re-share this content with your users and social media followers and puts it back on the map!

Build on the Good Performers – Take advantage of analytical tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console and look into what pieces of content perform best and build on this, for example, could you update content? Improve the formatting? Improve internal linking? Or add an information diagram or video to overall improve the performance of the content further?

Boost Poor Performers – In contrast to the above, have a look into the bad performers, could you add something in terms of content or visual elements to improve the performance of this piece of content, or perhaps it may be worth getting rid of it altogether, or merge parts of it with another piece of content.

Improve Website Structure – By looking into your content you may unearth new opportunities to merge content together and possibly improve the sites overall usability and strengthen key pages of your website.

Keep your Website Updated & Fresh – It’s a fact, Google does not like outdated websites, and as you expand your website it can be very easy to forget the older bits of content on your website. It is recommended to build into your content strategy to have a focus on consistently updating and monitoring your older content along with creating new content.

Get Featured on Search Engines – With the huge increase of Google Snippets on the Google search engine, it is important to make sure your content is in the right format to enable you to be included in these featured snippets. You will probably find that most of the old content found on your site will not be in the right format and could easily be adapted to make sure it is and give yourself a chance to be included.

Improve Key Metrics – There are many different organic ranking factors and by improving your older content there’s a chance you could help improve a few of these key metrics. If you improve your content by for example updating / adding new information or adding a diagram/video the chance is users will stay on the page for longer, share it and keep coming back for more.

Call to Actions – In recent years the importance of having a call to action features on your site has been heavily highlighted, therefore, it is well worth going back through your older content and alongside updating / improving your content ensure it has all the correct call to action functions to help improve your goal completion rates.

Increase your Goal Completion Figures – Whether your ultimate goal is to gain sales, enquires or improve your overall website traffic, there’s no doubt that by improving the content on your entire site on a consistent basis will only help this cause, it will give you the best chance to move up the organic rankings but it will also ensure users keep coming back for more and not look at your competitors offerings.

Create Sharable Content – By editing your content it gives you the opportunity to produce content that people want to share, perhaps you could build on the text making it more interesting and relevant, add an informative diagram, infographic or video. Alongside this make sure there a visible social share button to entice users to share this content.

Find New Content Ideas – Another great benefit of looking back at your old content is finding out what works and what doesn’t, if it works you should look at creating similar pieces of content around the same topic.

Update Existing Pages:

• Is there any outdated information?
• Could anything new be added to enhance the content?
• Could you add new media? – Diagrams, infographics or videos
• Is there internal linking or could it be improved?
• Is there a call to action points or could they be improved?
• Does the page include share buttons?
• Are the SEO basics done properly? Meta descriptions, alt tags, page title, etc.

To avoid cannibalisation issues and to improve key term performance, it may be better to merge parts of your content and consolidate them into one piece. Repurposing this content gives you the opportunity to reformat and strengthen your websites focus on these targeted key terms and overall improve the websites usability and content structuring.

Looking back over your content gives you the opportunity to reformat pages in the quest to improve website usability and increase the chances to secure invaluable search engine search snippets, for example, you may want to include bullet-pointed answers, lists, informative diagrams, educational videos, charts, and tables.

As previously mentioned, by analysing your content data will enable you to see what pieces are content are working for you and what subject areas bring in the most visitors and most importantly the right kind of user, from this, you can create similar content around the same or similar topic areas.

Evergreen content is content that is always relevant, however, that does not mean it doesn’t become outdated. Evergreen content is a great way to attract organic traffic and something search engines love when done right. Therefore, it is important you create evergreen content for your site and if you already have some make sure you regularly review it and look for ways to improve or update it. For example, you could change the format to please Google, add images, add infographics, add videos or simply add and update the content already there.

Creating good content is one thing, improving old content is another. However, if you don’t share it what is the point? You can always just wait for Google to come along and find it themselves, and sure, they probably will eventually if your site is structured correctly, but why not give them a helping hand?

Most businesses share their new content already but why not recycle older content and after making these changes share it again and get the piece of content back on the map.

There are many ways to share content these days, the obvious one being your social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube) but also look at other methods such as adding them to your newsletter or adding website notifications to your site and sharing them as you go.

To speak to one of our SEO experts about how we can help you, contact us today!