Old pages are some of the biggest missed opportunities for any business website. If you have an SEO strategy, we’re not sure why you don’t put more effort into updating them. Especially when they have the potential to bring you traffic faster than a new article can.
That’s why in this article from Cerebrum, we'll cover everything you need to know about how to update website content to help you get a quick boost in page visits. We’ll discuss a framework for identifying pages that need to be updated, how to add new content to each article, and how to optimize it for SEO.
Let’s begin!
Your website content has already been published. You invested money and time into posting it. And yet, you’re not getting as much traffic from it as you’d hoped. Worse yet, it’s out of date or not in alignment with your brand.
These are all problems that you can face with old content. And the only way to remedy this is by updating it.
Google is a big fan of fresh content. In fact, SEO experts generally agree that it’s a significant ranking factor. But beyond that, you could inject further content into your articles that help you cover the topics more completely, thus allowing you to rank for more keywords.
Unlike brand-new posts, which could take several weeks to get crawled by Google, your old posts (the ones that already rank on Google) are constantly being crawled. That means Google will detect changes quickly, and could adjust your rankings accordingly.
If you want your updates to be effective, you need to be intentional about how you do it. At Cerebrum, we have a specific process for updating content at scale to help it rank higher. We’ll share our process with you.
The challenging part about updating your website content is not knowing where to start.
Thankfully, Google Search Console will give you some good ideas.
What you want to do is go to Google Search Console and check out your Performance report. There, you should check the box that says “Average position.”
If you scroll down, you will see the “Pages” option, which you should click on.
Then, you can sort your pages by their position and filter for all keywords with a search position greater than 3.
Now it’s time to figure out which pages you need to edit.
The best pages to update are blog articles with an average position between 3 and 10. You can venture further down, but that would depend on how competitive the queries you’re trying to rank for are. Plus, how badly do you want to rank for them? Most likely, you’ll need to put more effort into those.
There are two questions you should ask when evaluating which articles need updating:
For number 1, evaluating whether to focus on an article depends on whether that keyword is a “money keyword”. I.e., it should be important to your business.
Money keywords usually look something like this:
Additionally, there should be enough monthly traffic to justify updating the article. We would recommend at least 50 impressions per month on Google Search Console, but a lot depends on how much a lead is worth to you. If you have a really high-intent keyword that’s garnering 30 impressions per month, by all means, target it.
For number 2, determining whether you could realistically rank higher depends a lot on the authority of the domains ranking above you (and how many there are). Using a keyword tool to check the “domain authority” of the pages above you (or whichever metric they use) is a good way to assess whether you could viably rank for a keyword.
Your original article had a focus keyword, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. But one way to improve your rankings is to find keywords related to the article and update the article with content that focuses on that.
There are two approaches to this. The first one is to use Google Search Console. After you select a page, you can view all the queries that it ranks for.
Just like with the main keywords, you can evaluate whether they’re worth targeting more in your article by seeing if they’re relevant to your business.
Now, the more expensive (and potentially even less accurate) approach is to use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs. Just type your article’s target keyword into their keyword explorer and you’ll get suggestions.
Similar rules apply to picking keywords with a tool. Generally speaking, you should try to target the least competitive search terms (with a keyword difficulty as close to 0 as possible). Again, targeting money keywords applies here too.
By the end, you should have a list of about 2-5 extra keywords to target in your article. Keep this list with you when you update it.
Competitor research is a necessary step, but not as important as you think it is.
As we noted earlier, researching how competitive your website is (in terms of domain authority) compared to the top articles is important. But another commonly used tactic when updating articles is to check the top 3 results for gaps between their content and yours.
This can be an alternate form of keyword research, after all, these articles might cover topics that you missed in the original version of your article. You can add the sections that they do and potentially rank for more keywords.
A word of warning, though: just because the topic appears in the article doesn’t mean that you should cover it. Maybe it’s totally irrelevant to answering the query, or maybe it’s completely irrelevant to the topics that you typically cover on your website. Some judgment is required here.
So, with some new target keywords in hand and some idea of the competition that you’re up against, you can begin to pinpoint which sections to add.
Part of your competitor research should also be about matching the intent of the target keyword. Check the format of their article versus yours. Maybe they wrote a listicle article while you wrote a how-to guide. If the target keyword starts with “How” then maybe you’re right. But if the keyword starts with “top” then it might be time to adjust.
Next, comb through your article to find:
Your new additions need to flow smoothly with the rest of the article. So instead of blindly adding words, do a skeleton outline of the sections that need to be added. Then, you can start writing.
These days, the easiest way to update your article is with the click of a button; using some AI tool.
But that’s not the best way. Especially if you care about accuracy and getting your message across. Not to mention, Google frowns upon AI content.
All in all, not the best way to get your existing articles to rank higher.
So, to make your website content more engaging, you should follow our tips for updating them.
Then, once you finish the article you’ll want to read through it for the typical stuff:
However, there are also some SEO points that you need to address
Once you’re satisfied with the quality of your article, you can go to your CMS and post the new version.
There are a couple of things to check up on here.
First, make sure that your target URL stays the same. In some cases, to better target a particular keyword (given your earlier research) you might want to change the keyword. In that case, you’ll also want to go to your hosting provider and run a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
Keep in mind that changing the URL isn’t something you should do unless you feel it to be absolutely necessary.
Second, make sure that the publish date (or “updated” date) changes so that Google and readers can recognize that your content is fresher.
Hitting “publish” should only be the beginning of your content.
You should have a plan for promoting and repurposing your content across various social media channels. The least you can do is make a LinkedIn or Twitter post announcing the updated article.
But if you isolate the main points of the article into buyer pain points, you probably have potent material for about 2 or 3 LinkedIn posts. Just find a new spin and your circle will love it!
Depending on the nature of your audience, you could also promote your insights on Reddit or Facebook, provided you find the right subreddits/groups.
Of course, not everyone is a professional writer, and going around and updating your content could drain your time. All in all, researching, writing, editing, and optimizing can easily take 3 hours or more, even for a small update.
There’s a much faster way of doing this. Especially if you want to boost your website traffic quickly.
At Cerebrum, we’ve perfected the process of upgrading SEO content. We’ve created a systematized process to update website content that helps your existing web pages get the attention that they deserve. We focus on both strategy and quality so you can get more out of your content strategy than ever before.
Contact us at nicolas[at]thecerebrum.co if you want to discuss more!
