You might already know that your website needs content to bring in traffic and make conversions, but actually creating this content can be much more complicated. Creating high-quality content takes a huge amount of time and effort to do correctly, so when you invest this much into something, you want to get the most out of it. However, the older a piece of content gets, the less you’re likely to get out of it. This can make it seem like you’ve done all that work just for it to go to waste. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend all of your time constantly publishing all-new content, only to leave it to get old and outdated.
Updating old content is the best way of getting more out of the resources you put into your content marketing and can also help make regularly publishing fresh content less strenuous.
Benefits of Updating Old Content
Optimize for More Effective Keywords
When you originally wrote a piece of content, you likely did keyword research for it to know what terms you had the best chance at ranking for. However, the best keywords to use can change over time. People aren’t always going to use the same exact keywords, and there are likely many different ones that could fit in your content that would appeal better to users’ searches. In some cases, you might not have done any keyword research at all or didn’t include enough keywords in your content.
Without the right keywords, your content won’t rank for all the searches that it potentially could. This is why it’s so important to occasionally go back and update your old content with newer or more keywords. While you might not have implemented these keywords yet, you don’t always have to create a new piece of content to target them. When keywords are missing or have decreased in search traffic, it’s time to see what you can add to help make your content more impactful.
Update Old Information
In many industries, information can change frequently. You may have written an older piece of content that was accurate at the time but is now outdated. When this happens, you might think that you have to write something new with the updated information. However, if the changes aren’t significant, there’s no reason you can’t simply fix it to include accurate information. You already have most of the work done, so in some cases, there’s no reason you should start over.
Having old content on your website also risks your audience getting the wrong information. While this might be a simple mistake and you never meant for it to mislead anyone, when people find errors on your website, you risk losing their trust. Updating your old content allows you to be confident knowing that everything you say on your website is still relevant and accurate.
Likewise, you may have linked to content that existed at the time but isn’t there anymore. Broken links lead to a poor user experience and are a waste considering how easy it is to swap out for something else. You don’t only want to update the content you wrote yourself, you also need to check the content you’ve linked to.
Improve Click-Through-Rate
While ranking higher in the SERPs can help you bring in more traffic, this isn’t the only way of getting users’ attention when they make a search. Even if you aren’t in the first position, you can still help bring more traffic to your website by working on improving your click-through rate. This is the percentage of users you click on your website when it shows up in their online searches. Of course, the higher ranking your website will do, the better your chances at increasing your CTR are.
However, there are ways of making your website look better in the SERPs and increasing its CTR in any position. Often, this involves optimizing your meta titles and descriptions to make them more appealing, but the date of your content can also affect your CTR. Of course, most people will want the most accurate information when they look through their search results. Your content might contain all the information they need, but if it’s older than all the other results, users might leave it as a last resort, if they even click on it at all. Updating your content and making the date more recent could make your website look like a better result for a user’s search.
Keep Content Fresh
It’s important to keep content on your website fresh, both for users and search engines. While you might think that fresh content means something 100% new, this isn’t entirely true. Your website should have completely new content on it frequently, but content freshness also refers to recently updated content as well. Content freshness alone isn’t enough to help it rank better, but, of course, the more accurate your information is, the more value it provides to users.
There are older pieces of content that can still rank very well despite not being fresh, but if you have an older piece that isn’t performing as well as it used to, updating it may help. Fresh content can provide many benefits that you lose when it gets stale, so while updating content might not automatically make it rank better, it could send a better signal to search engines.
Get Your Site Indexed More Often
One of the most important reasons you need fresh content on your website is to help improve the way your site is crawled and indexed. Crawling and indexing are essential for getting your pages to rank well in the SERPs, although getting crawled and indexed often and efficiently can be challenging. This is especially true if your website doesn’t get updated frequently. The more your content and website are updated, the more you’ll get indexed and crawled. A stale website does not have much going on that requires search engine bots to give it any attention.
Of course, new content will help get pages crawled and indexed, but you shouldn’t leave older content to be forgotten about if it still covers relevant topics. Updating your old content can help send signals to search engine bots that your pages need to be recrawled and indexed to help them perform better in the SERPs. While you can’t force search engines to crawl and index your pages, keeping content fresh is one best practice that can help you optimize for this.
Invest in Content Marketing Services for Your Website
Even when you get your content right the first time, there are often benefits to revising it later on. However, knowing which pages to update when, and what the most effective changes to make are, can be challenging. Not only can updating old content be challenging and require a lot of skill, but getting new content in the first place can be difficult for many businesses. With content marketing services, your business doesn’t have to worry about doing any of this on its own.
Contact ENX2 Marketing today to find out how we can help you get the content your website needs!