Content refreshing is one of the best ways to increase the traffic to your existing content, and it’s also a great way to keep the information on your website fresh and up to date.
However, the content refreshing process isn’t always straightforward. For example, some people worry about tanking their organic traffic if they update the content (a valid concern).
Other people find that it just doesn’t bring the dramatic traffic increase that some marketing experts promise.
Fortunately for you, I’ve been both of those people.
I’ve updated probably more than 50 blog posts in the past 12 months, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. However, I’ve also seen outstanding results, such as content that drives 10 times more traffic and soars in rankings.
That said, I really wanted to know why some posts perform dramatically better post-update than others.
So I did a data study on what makes some content dramatically more successful post-update and why others continue to flounder.
Using this data, I’ve come up with a content refreshing strategy that has significantly improved my content refreshing success rate. Today, I want to share that strategy with you.
In this article, we’ll cover the following:
Which blog posts should you update?
How to update your blog posts
Which blog posts should you update?
Contrary to popular belief, not all blog posts are worth updating. This is one of the single most impactful realizations that has improved my content refreshing success rate.
In fact, I only recommend prioritizing updates for old content that earned 20+ monthly visitors at peak performance.
Why?
In the data study mentioned above, 45% of the updated posts had fewer than 20 visitors per month pre-update. Unfortunately, this 45% of updated posts only contributed 15% of the total traffic increase (of a 96% total organic traffic increase).
That means blog posts that already had 20+ monthly visitors before the update contributed the majority of the total organic traffic increase.
( Img Credit - Ahref Blog)
My guess is posted with more traffic pre-update already rank for some keywords in positions #5–10. Therefore, it’s much easier to go from positions #5–10 to first than zero to first.
So what should you do with blog posts that have fewer than 20 monthly visitors?
Assuming these posts are targeting keywords that are valuable to your business or contain important thought leadership ideas, it’s definitely worth updating them.
In addition, a smaller blog will generally have a lot more blog posts with fewer than 20 monthly visitors simply because it needs time to gain traction.
Therefore, it’s still worthwhile to update them, but prioritize posts with the most potential first.
How to update your blog posts
Once you know which posts to update, how do you actually update them? I’ve found that a lot of companies give freelance writers a process that looks like this:
Update old statistics, facts, quotes
Add additional paragraphs for keywords the posts are missing
Remove sections that are no longer relevant
However, I’ve found that the above strategy isn’t the best approach to refreshing content. It makes the content more up-to-date but doesn’t consider how the post is (or is not) fulfilling the search intent.
In other words, you have to ask why your content isn’t as useful as the posts ranking well on Google. (I’m willing to bet it’s not just because there’s an outdated statistic in the third paragraph.)
From the content refreshing research I’ve done, your post probably isn’t ranking because there is another post that:
Is more current.
Provides actionable advice (or more relevant details).
Offers an excellent user experience.
Is a better fit for the searcher’s intent.
To address these issues, here are the action steps you need to take while updating your content.
1. Update outdated information
I know I just said that refreshing content is much more than just updating outdated information—but it is a part of the process.
In addition, I’m talking about more than just updating old statistics and quotes. Often, you’ll have to update (or completely change) the examples to improve how they match the search intent.
For example, this is one of my most successful content refreshing examples ever. It was generating about 4,000 monthly visitors when I first updated it in 2019. At its peak performance, it generated about 20,000 monthly visitors.
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3. Improve the user experience
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