Do you have an old post that’s dying on the vine, not gaining any traction with new readers?

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Want to increase your content marketing game without adding tons of extra time to your editorial calendar? Look no further than a content refresh!

Not only will this give you fresh, engaging content, but it also shows Google that you're keeping up with the latest news (Relevance) and have the highest Quality content. As shown here by Google, these are two keys for your content to reach the top of Google's search results.

What Is a Content Refresh?

A content refresh is a deep edit of your existing web content. It can involve capturing new quotes from experts and weaving them into an old article, or it may be more comprehensive, like changing the angle of a piece or reworking it into new audio or video content.

You might be asking yourself: How do I know when it’s time to update my blog posts or Why Should I update my posts?

Top 3 Reasons For a Content Refresh

1.     Stay Ahead of The Competition and Rank Higher

2.     Show You’re Relevance by adding higher Quality content

3.     Get Results Without Having to Spend Your Hard-Earned Money

Stay Ahead Of The Competition and Rank Higher

And you are competing, right?

Only, this content refresh competition could mean the difference between putting food on your table and starving.

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A Bit Much for A Content Refresh?

A bit much?

Ok, maybe it’s not that dramatic, but the fact of the matter is you ARE competing if you want your content to produce leads and grow your business. You’re competing with the other sites that pop up when someone searches for your product or keyword on Google.

And you want to be:

Hopeful ranking after content refresh to get more leads

That’s why ranking is so important. This post from the Boss Magazine breaks it down perfectly, “High rankings are important for search engine optimization because they lead to more qualified visitors. The more qualified visitors your site gets, the more successful it will be.”

Don’t believe me yet? Here’s a graph from ahrefs.com showing the correlation of a high Click-Through-Rate to search position in Google. Look at that curve fall off a cliff after the 3^rd position or so:

Importance of Ranking Position to Click Through Rate

This shows you that if you aren’t in the top 5 in search results, your chances of someone clicking your link is about 20% of what it is in the top 5 spots.

Now you know why it’s important to rank so high so let’s move onto another reason to refresh your content and score those top-5 positions.

Show You’re Relevance by adding higher Quality Content

Relevance, or how relevant your content is to the searcher’s query, is one of the key factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, recently talked about old vs. bad content on Search Engine Journal and how to deal with them.

To summarize Google, “After identifying relevant content, Google’s systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. They look for signals that can help determine which content demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”

This might include looking at the number of followers or engagements a piece of content has had, the number of comments it has received, or the reactions on social media.

You Seeing the Benefits of a Content Refresh

This goes back to wanting to show up higher on searches so you get more clicks and people viewing your site. And to be able to do this without shelling out wads of cash, all it takes a little research and work.

Get Results Without Having to Spend Your Hard-Earned Money

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you don’t have piles of excess cash lying around. One of the great things about a content refresh is that you can do it relatively quickly and for FREE.

There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to give your site a content refresh and with a little bit of time and effort, you can dramatically boost your site’s clicks by 2x – 10x what it was getting.

We’ve tried to pull the best and most relevant info into one place for you because being an entrepreneur and possibly pressed for time, we want to help you get it right as quickly as possible.

How To Update Your Old Posts Properly

Let’s conduct a step-by-step process to update old posts and get the most bang for your buck.

Here are 4 steps to updating your old posts most efficiently:

1.     Conduct a Content Audit

2.     Decide Which Posts to Update

3. Identify any Content Gaps

4. Update and Refresh Content

Conduct a Content Audit

To ensure that your current content is performing as well as it can, it’s important to review it periodically.

Editing for a Content Refresh

If the traffic hasn’t increased over the past few months, add it to a list to be refreshed. Working in batches like this makes for a smoother workflow.

Here are a few questions to help determine if your content needs a content refresh:

-   How many posts are outranking yours?

-   What is the performance of your post like?

-   Can you use your domain authority to rank higher?

Decide Which Posts to Update

How do you know which posts to update?

Megan Mahoney from ahrefs.com conducted a study and recommends updating posts that already have 20+ visitors per month. Based on her study, only the posts with this many views contributed to a total traffic increase on your site.

Not to say you should NEVER update your other posts, but use this as a way to prioritize until you have more free time.

Identify any Content Gaps

These are areas where your post is under-performing, meaning it probably has 1 or more of these attributes:

-   It’s Out of Date-Time to replace old information with the most current

-   Doesn’t Provide Any Actionable Advice-Searchers want to know the next step so make sure it’s in the post and easy to identify

-   Not the Best Fit for Searcher’s Intent-Incorrect post style, Post is too long, and not solving the searcher’s problem

Now that we know what we want to change, let’s get updating!

Update and Refresh Content

Voila!

We’ve updated the outdated information, included actionable advice, and tidied up our format to perfectly fit the searcher’s intent.

It’s time for the last few tweaks to supercharge your post towards the top of the rankings and don’t skimp because they could be game changers!

Your Post Rocketing Up the Rankings After a Content Refresh

Now it’s time to improve your title tag and meta description to create an attention-grabbing title and sidebar description, add a few relevant internal links to the post, and include links to your blog and other social media platforms.

What Now?

I’d be lying if I said that’s all you have to do forever.

The truth is, you should be going through this process monthly, or at least every six months to make sure you keep ranking near the top and getting those clicks.

If you do, you just might be surprised by how your business organically grows and slowly, steadily, starts to increase your bottom line.

For more tips on how to grow your business and use our free resources to do so, check out our blog.