The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to build a new content strategy for your business. One of the easiest tactics to generate new traffic is also one of the most overlooked: Updating and expanding your old content.
The benefits of content upgrades
The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to build a new content strategy for your business. One of the easiest tactics to generate new traffic is also one of the most overlooked: Updating and expanding your old content.
The benefits of content upgrades
Unlike fine wine, the content on your site doesn’t necessarily age well, with some pieces degrading as time goes on. Creating new content is not always needed when you have a body of good content that can be made to work harder and deliver quick results with some refreshing.
Step 1: First, go to Google Analytics and select Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
Make sure that you first segment the data by Organic Traffic so you’re viewing only the most-visited pages by organic users. Make a note of the top 10 to 15 pages driving the most organic traffic to your website. You can either use the export feature in GA or simply copy and paste the list into a google sheet.
Note: Google doesn’t show the root URL, which is fine for the next steps.
Step 2: Next, you can use Google Search Console data to provide insights into how to upgrade the new content.
In Search Console, go to Performance report in the left navigation, select your date range, and click the + NEW button to segment the data by page URL. I normally select the filter “URLs is exactly” and then copy and paste the top URL from our list.
Once you have added your URL, you will see all of the search terms that people used to find your page.
We wrote this particular article to cover the issue of the “Chrome not secure notice” if your website wasn’t secure, but saw that we had a lot of searches related to “how to make a website secure.” You will want to find similar search patterns that your initial article didn’t cover or didn’t delve into and upgrade that section of your article to better align with the search patterns.
Make sure you choose search patterns that are relevant for your business and the original article. In this case, you can see a nice increase in traffic until the November Google core update that targeted relevance. The intent of the original article was about the “Chrome not secure warning” rather than how to make a website secure.
We are following these same tactics to try to recapture the lost traffic in a more relevant way.
There is no set standard for updating frequency and realistically this varies by website and industry.
If you are just starting out, you won’t need to focus on updating content for at least 12 months. If you have an existing blog that gets traffic, every six months is a good timeframe to review data and determine which content is doing well or could benefit from updating. If your industry is often in flux, you may find that content needs to be updated much more often to stay current. If, however, you have more than 10,000 visitors a month, you might want to update your content quarterly.
If you’re looking for a way to boost your rankings, improve your SEO and provide better information to your readers, consider updating your existing content. This is a good option to leverage your current SEO and avoid creating new content that will likely take time to start working. Don’t forget: Once you’ve updated your content, it’s time to share and promote it as well.
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