A Quick and Easy Guide to Refreshing SEO Content

Intro

Digital content marketing is one of the most powerful and accessible tools for businesses of all sizes. Nevertheless, many brands find it challenging to take a consistently effective approach to search engine optimization (SEO). One of the areas companies tend to overlook is the maintenance of their existing assets, rather than simply focusing on newer content.

It’s important to remember that past content — even those pieces you created months or years ago — can still be valuable tools. Not to mention that you invested significant resources in the planning and creation of each of these assets. Therefore, it’s wise to take practical steps to ensure their longevity. You need to make reviewing and improving past pieces of content a key part of your ongoing SEO strategy.

You may find it difficult to know how to be most effective in this tactic. So, we’ve put together a quick and easy guide to refreshing your SEO content.

Identify Content to Refresh

Refreshing all of your SEO content is unlikely to be necessary for most circumstances. Not to mention that it’s not especially practical or cost-effective. Therefore, it’s important to be able to identify what specific pieces of content could benefit most from a few key changes. This enables you to maintain the balance of retaining the value of existing assets while ensuring they are best suited to the current market.

The most efficient approach here is usually to perform a full web audit. You can certainly do this manually, but Ranktracker’s Website Audit 2.0 tool may be a more efficient and data-driven approach.

This type of tool scans all the pages on your website and catalogues the various SEO issues with your content. Importantly, the audit results give you actionable insights into how you can effectively refresh or repair these elements.

The next step is to prioritize the content to refresh. The automated audit tool does provide information about what issues are most urgent from a technical standpoint. However, it’s also important to prioritize your adjustments in line with your marketing goals. While there may be clear changes to make to some content according to the scan, the needs of your current campaign may mean that focusing on other materials should take precedence.

Refresh for Accuracy

There are various elements that can impact the quality of your website content. One of the most important of these is how accurate the claims and statistics you provide are. This aspect impacts your ability to be considered an authoritative source. Indeed, if you’re hosting your-money-your-life (YMYL) content, accuracy is both an SEO consideration and ethical duty. It is, therefore, a key area of focus for refreshing your content.

Accuracy is not always a static concept. The reliability of information can change over time, as a result of a range of factors. New research might supersede the results of previous studies. There will be trends that change on a regular basis. Addressing this will require a manual assessment of all your content. Go through each page and check any specific claims being made. Apply solid research to establish the continued accuracy of these components and update them wherever necessary.

Another area of accuracy you’ll need to refresh is your sources of information related to the claims in your content. In some instances, the credibility of sources can become questionable. In others, it’s simply more SEO-friendly to link to more recent studies that provide the same results.

Make It More Engaging

One of the key priorities of SEO content is to ensure users are keen to engage with it. This does not only result in brand development and potential conversions for your business. It also, in turn, contributes to improvements in the rankings of your website materials. When you’re refreshing your SEO content, you need to establish what you can do to make it more engaging.

It’s important to improve the value your content provides users. Many of the factors search engines use to rank websites are related to the ability of the public to treat it as a reliable resource. Google has been particularly strict about prioritizing people-first content. So, you need to ensure that your content effectively answers questions, provides practical and accurate guidance, or is particularly entertaining. You can also enhance both value and SEO efficacy by confirming that your web design makes pages easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and quick to load.

You can also enhance the engagement of your content by adding a greater variety of content elements. When you use more creative content, your pages tend to stand apart from your competitors in the market. This can include inserting visual content like relevant memes or infographics to better illustrate your discussion points. You can also make videos and interactive puzzle games related to the subject of the content to make the text richer and more usable. Remember, though, that you can’t treat these tactics as shortcuts to success. Make certain the additional creative content you use maintains high standards of quality.

Renew the Keywords

There are various approaches to creating SEO content. For instance, there’s a lot of discourse about the efficacy of utilizing keywords. However, as with so many aspects of content marketing, the way you use keywords directly impacts their success. You can’t just bloat your text with irrelevant phrases. It’s also important to recognize that the relevance and efficacy of certain keywords and phrases will change over time. Therefore, part of your SEO content refreshment approach needs to include updating your keywords.

Take the time to regularly research the keywords you’ve previously focused on in your content. The best approach to this is usually to adopt an analytical tool, like Ranktracker’s Keyword Finder. At its most basic, this allows you to enter each of your keywords and assess how difficult it is to rank by the word or phrase in different territories. It can also show you alternatives you’re more likely to rank with so you can place them in your content. Not to mention that you can also assess the keyword’s interest history over time to predict when to make effective changes.

Remember, though, that it’s not enough to simply replace the keywords in your content. Keywords tend to be at their most effective when they’re utilized in a contextually relevant way. Therefore, it can be wise to create new paragraphs that revolve around the keyword. This gives you the opportunity to ensure that it is achieving the maximum contextual relevance both for the section it's in and for the overall piece.

Make Content More Competitive

When you’re deep into the weeds of refreshing your content, it can be easy to focus on the internal priorities of your brand. Yet, at its heart, SEO content is a way to make you more competitive. You’re pitting your content against other businesses in your industry and may be targeting similar demographics. You’re in a battle to move to the top of the rankings. Therefore, it’s important to find ways to refresh your content to make it more competitive.

This isn’t a case of just creating more content or using your keywords more times than the other websites in your particular field. Rather, it’s about establishing how you can refresh your content to fill needs or bridge gaps that your competition isn’t making use of. Using a search-engine-results-page (SERP) analysis tool, like Ranktracker’s SERP Checker, can be an efficient approach to this.

The SERP checker enables you to gain quick and detailed insights into your target search terms in the current market. It allows you to see whether there are phrases your competitors aren’t using in global, national, and localized spaces. It also includes snapshots of the presence or absence of key SERP features — such as snippets and reviews. You can then update your content with these elements to push your competitive edge.

Conclusion

An effective SEO strategy doesn’t only rely on creating new content on a regular basis. It also requires your marketing team to commit to reviewing and refreshing content that already exists on your website. This should begin with assessing the site for areas of SEO weakness and assigning priorities for change in line with your marketing goals.

You should be aware, too, that value and authority continue to be vital influencers of rankings. Therefore, it’s important to take steps to ensure your content is accurate and that you’re utilizing the most engaging content components. Remember that there are tools to help you review your current keywords and assess the SERP features of your target phrases. Leverage the data you gain from these to adjust your content to perform more effectively and competitively.

Your existing content materials are valuable and effective assets. By implementing some relatively simple practices, your marketing team can continue to raise your brand’s profile in global and local online marketplaces.