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Refreshing Old Content To Improve SEO Performance

Lucie Ogé
July 11, 2024

Refreshing the content on your site ensures that it’s as relevant as possible for searchers, enhancing your site’s authority and credibility. As Google is a user-first search engine, it will recognise that the content has been refreshed and it will favour it over outdated content, increasing your organic visibility and rankings.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of updating outdated content, providing practical tips and assistance on how to do it effectively. We’ll even show you some examples of the impact that refreshing existing content had on one of our client’s priority category pages.

The Importance Of Refreshing Content For SEO

Refreshing content involves updating existing content to ensure that it’s up-to-date, relevant, valuable and engaging to your target audience. A content refresh might include adding quotes, updating data or even completely reworking the content to cover what users are expecting to see from their search query.

By ensuring that the topic is well covered and answers what searchers are expecting to see when performing a search, you’ll increase the chances of the refreshed content performing better.

There are several benefits to refreshing existing content:

Helps with E-E-A-T as it provides readers with the most relevant, up-to-date information to provide a better user experience (UX).
Search engines favour fresh, high-quality content. Regular content maintenance indicates that your website is actively maintained and authoritative, which can improve your rankings and visibility.
Saves time from researching and drafting an article from scratch.
If done right, refreshing can help old posts get fresh backlinks from authoritative sources.

How To Update Existing Content

When updating existing SEO content, it’s important to first understand which pages could perform better. At Proof3, use various tools to analyse your content to help us make an informed decision about which pages to prioritise. Once we have this data, we’ll then conduct further research to understand how we can help you update the content.

Content can be updated in various ways, including:

Optimising for new keywords
Optimising for user intent
Adding new information
Updating information to reflect new laws and regulations
Refreshing visuals and adding interactive formats
Consolidating similar articles into one in-depth article

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Keyword Optimisation

Once we know which pages need to be refreshed, we’ll conduct thorough keyword research to help us understand the phrases your audience uses when searching for information. We’ll consider elements like relevancy, search volume, related search terms, competition, long-tail keywords and related questions surrounding the keyword.

We’ll also consider emerging trends and industry news surrounding the topic to understand what is gaining traction amongst your target audience. By doing this, we can help to ensure that your content is shown above competitors that may have missed these emerging trends.

Optimise For User Intent

User intent is the reason why a user has conducted a search and is one of the most important elements to consider when updating existing SEO content.

By aligning your content with the intent of the query that they’re searching for, your content is likely to be more valuable and relevant to the user, helping your content perform better in the search results.

Our user intent article covers everything you need to know about intent, but in short, these are the four types of user intent:

Informational Intent: Users are seeking information or answers to their questions.
Navigational Intent: Users are looking for a specific website or page.
Commercial Intent: Users are considering making a purchase, but may still be researching their options.
Transactional Intent: Users are ready to make a purchase or take a specific action.

Optimise For SERP Features

Search engine result page (SERP) features are unique results that appear in the SERP to provide concise answers to users’ queries. They can appear as image carousels, review stars, featured snippets and knowledge panels to name a few, and can improve the chances of your content being prominently displayed in the SERP.

The way that SERP features are formatted will depend on which feature you’re targeting. It’s important to format them correctly as it helps Google identify how to display your content in the SERP. If you’d like more help with formatting featured snippets, drop us a line. Our specialist SEO team will conduct a structured data audit to identify areas where you’re missing opportunities for structured data or where it could be improved.

Conduct Regular Content Audits

Regularly conducting content audits helps identify outdated or underperforming articles, taking proactive steps to refresh them as necessary to improve your SEO performance and UX.

Remember: make use of social media platforms to further promote updated content to your audience to increase visibility, engagement and traffic to your website. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to gather feedback and encourage your followers to share the content.

Refreshing Content Examples

At Proof3, we constantly strive to improve our client pages, from blog pages to improving priority category pages. Here are some key examples of how refreshing category pages helped one of our client’s category pages improve year on year.

Example 1: Autumn Planting – Alliums

As you can see, our client has seen a significant increase in organic visibility since refreshing the content on one of their priority category landing pages. In fact, their alliums category impressions increased year on year by 148% and their ranking increased by 21 positions overall.

Example 2: Autumn Planting – Hyacinths

As you can see, the organic visibility for our client’s hyacinth priority category also saw significant improvements since refreshing its content. Their impressions for this category increased by 125% year on year and their ranking increased by 12 positions overall.

Refreshing Content For SEO FAQs

1. Does Updating Your Content Improve SEO Rankings?

Updating old content allows you to generate relevant traffic and it shows that your content is fresh and relevant. Both can help improve your content’s rankings.

2. What Is Fresh Content In SEO?

Fresh content includes new, revamped or regularly updated content.

3. How Does Google Measure How Fresh Content Is?

Google uses an indexing system that looks at a number of factors, such as when the page was created, the amount of change and the rate of page change to measure content freshness. The indexing system helps search engines present the most recent and relevant search results.

4. When Should You Refresh Your Content?

There isn’t a set best time to refresh your content, it all depends on regularly maintaining and auditing your site. Generally, if you see a drop in organic traffic, your ranking has dropped significantly or there have been major industry changes, it’s probably a good time to consider refreshing your content.

Ready to take your content to the next level?

SEO is all about regular audits and website maintenance. If you don’t monitor the performance of your content to ensure that it’s relevant and up-to-date, you could be hindering your site’s SEO performance.

If you’d like us to take a look at your existing content or you’d like help refreshing old content, drop us a line. Our SEO team will audit your existing content, providing actionable suggestions to help improve your site’s visibility, authority and relevance.

Don’t let the potential of your content gather dust – harness the power that refreshing your existing content has.

Written by

With over a decade of experience in the SEO world, Lucie had the opportunity to work on both sides of the fence – client and agency. She grew up in France, then moved to Romania for a while before settling in England, where she started working in SEO in London. After a few years, she took off to New Zealand to work in SEO overseas before finding her way back to England, in Stafford this time. She's dabbled in all things SEO, but does have a strong preference for technical SEO and content. When she's not knee-deep in SEO stuff, you'll likely find her baking an absurd amount of cakes in the kitchen, striking a pose in yoga class, pounding the pavement on a run, or curling up with her cat and a good book.