With the way AI transformed marketing in 2023, the way we create content even a year ago is so yesterday. That outstanding 2,000-word blog you wrote in April 2023 that gained nine warm leads went silent six months later. Or that how-to video on a particular piece of equipment is now outdated due to newer products coming online.
Whatever the reasoning behind the loss of traffic, you can do two things with your content. We suggest treating older content like a used car. Is the vehicle worth fixing and keeping? Or are the repairs not worth the extra time, effort, and costs to maintain?
Keep reading our guide to refreshing your older content the right way. Then, try some experiments to see if your metrics start to rebound.
Why Should You Update Content?
Just because something is old doesn’t mean you throw it away. Yet refreshing content isn’t as daunting as it might seem. In a benchmark study done in 2020 by Contentsquare, around 69% of online content is never seen, according to MarTech.
Ask yourself if the content is still useful to your users. If so, consider keeping it and updating it. We’ve found success with two types of content for blogs: Short blogs that answer one question or long-form content that answers multiple questions in the same article.
Let’s say you have multiple short blogs from five years ago on related topics that aren’t getting much traffic anymore. Think about combining the shorter blogs into a longer guide and then measure the results.
Another reason is that the Googlebot Overlords love to see fresh content relevant to your target audience. New content can foster a bump in your rankings. Yes, you should create content that resonates with your audience. To get it to rank organically in a Google search, you’ll need to get people to click on it and have the right keywords once the clicks taper off.
Check Your SEO Metrics Before Refreshing Older Content
Dive into your SEO metrics and KPIs using the tools you have on hand before refreshing your older content. Google Search Console offers the easiest way to do this. However, this free tool has limits. Data only goes back 16 months, and it limits the number of pages you can see to 500 at a time. However, Google Search Console is the best free tool to see the searches people use to find your website’s content.
If you have a large site with hundreds of blogs, consider tapping into third-party tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs to monitor the performance of keywords you want to rank for. These tools also have limits, such as a lack of historical data before you input the keywords you want to track.
See What the Competition Is Doing
Next, see what your competitors are doing for similar content. You can handle this by searching for the keywords you want to rank higher for to see what is on the first page of the results. For competitor-specific results, do a site search using the parameters [keywords] site:yourcompetitor.com.
Look at the top result for the keyword in the Google search. Click on that content and see how it differs from yours. Improve your content to make it better than the content that ranks first. For instance, the top-ranking content has 2,000 words versus yours at 1,000. Add more content to your blog and make it more readable. Another thing you can do is add a video to your page.
Add Multimedia Elements to Your Pages
There are mountains of statistics you can find on the internet about how video performs well for content. But here’s one to chew on: Out of 528 video marketers surveyed in 2024, 87% say videos have increased dwell time on their website, according to an OptinMonster survey.
Try embedding a video with your blog to refresh the content. Let’s say you have a product on your website that sells well with your customers. But the how-to guide about how to use the product is outdated because of the upgrades you’ve produced in the past five years. Refresh that content with new verbiage and a brief video (no longer than 10 minutes) on using the updated product.
Monitor the Changes With Your New Content
We’ll show you one of our own success stories. Using a merge/kill strategy, where we merged some blogs or got rid of others, we helped one client increase traffic to one of its most popular blogs when we updated its content.
Looking at the screenshot below from Google Search Console, you’ll see the initial blog was published in mid-June 2019. It had 212 clicks out of 6,876 organic impressions for a CTR of 3.1%. We took that blog down in mid-September 2023, or a period of 4 years and 3 months (51 months). That comes out to slightly more than four clicks per month.
The refreshed content, which has been published for five months as of this writing, already has 258 clicks and has shown up in an organic search 9,654 times. The refreshed blog has had about 51 clicks per month since it started. So, it’s gotten 10 times as much traffic as the older blog, even though it’s been live about 1/10 as long as the now-vanquished blog.
Your actual results will vary based on other factors. But this is one example of how refreshing your old content can have enormous results.
Experiment With Placement and Types of CTAs
Refreshing your content is more than just updating the verbiage or adding a video. Consider playing around with different CTAs and A/B testing two pages at a time to see which ones work better. Does a form do better than a Call Now button? What about an interactive quiz? How does the placement of the CTAs affect your traffic? Do CTAs above the fold perform better than ones further down the page?
Don’t Have Time to Refresh Older Content? We Can Do That
BigPxl can help you refresh older content and write new content that speaks to your target audience as part of an overall SEO strategy. Contact us or call (417) 799-2233 for more information. Let’s talk.
