Have you noticed that your website content isn’t ranking as highly as it used to? Perhaps you’re looking for ways to drive more SEO traffic to your website, but are struggling to find the time to write a whole load of new articles and website content.
Despite what some experts may tell you, it’s not always about writing loads and loads of content, but also taking a look at your existing copy and giving it a bit of a refresh.
We always advise that our clients get the most out of content that has already been created and make it work as hard as it can. Going over your existing articles and updating the content where necessary can make a huge difference to how search engines read the information and encourage more traffic to be driven to your website.
There are a whole load of reasons for why your content might need updating, or it could be a combination of all of them. We’ve pulled together some of the most common benefits for giving your content a spruce up.
The first and most obvious point is that by creating content that is more readable, useful and accurate for your audience will help search engines like Google to read it, understand it and rank it higher for people to find it.
When you create content that is engaging and actually useful for your audience, they’re going to spend more time on your website and get more out of it than they would have previously. When you go back through your content, have a think about what kind of information they’ll be looking for and what value you can add. This will help you to restructure and update the blog in the best way.
One of the key reasons why search engine ranking exists is to separate out the useful, valid information from the nonsense. When you update your website content, you’re validating your position as a thought-leader - someone that your audience can trust. This will make them more likely to share your content with others and interact further with your brand.
No matter how much time you spend writing and updating content, there’s no doubt that your competitors are out there doing the same. Quite frankly, it’d be a pretty difficult task to stay ahead of everyone, but keeping track of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it can be a great way of understanding what to do with your own content. It’s worth taking a look at what’s doing well in the SERPs relating to your industry and using this to form a basis for what you could be doing better.
Google updates their algorithms all the time, but there are some which have a larger effect than others on how information on your website is used. Google’s ‘Helpful Content’ update, for example, was launched in August of 2022 and focused on rewarding content that helps or informs people, rather than text that’s simply designed to rank well in a Google search. Keeping up to date with what’s going on in the world of search engine algorithms will be a huge help in understanding how your content should be written and laid out to maximise your SEO opportunities, as well as the benefit to your readers.
When working out where to start with reviewing your content, there are a few different areas you can focus on. Firstly, if you’ve got any pages that used to drive quite a lot of traffic to your site but are now not performing as well, it’s likely these are now being beaten out by content on your competitors’ sites. You should also look at the pages that are ranking the highest, taking time to update them before they begin to drop.
Finally, you should focus on pages which have a lot of useful information in them, but have never performed as well as you’d hoped. These are a great place to implement your new best practice content strategy.
Once you’ve decided to begin a content refresh, there are a few areas that you should put particular focus on. These include:
Revisit the keywords that were used in the article and understand whether these are still relevant. It may be that the best keywords have changed completely, so you may need to do a bit more rejigging and rewording to make the article or webpage more relevant.
If you’ve used any stats or facts within your copy, it’s worth reviewing these to make sure they are still up to date. You should also double check that any sources you’ve used or referred to are still active, or whether there is other, more up-to-date information that could be used in its place.
It’s not always just the content that needs to be updated, sometimes it can be helpful to restructure your content to make it easier to read for your audience. Even something as simple as adding in more headers and creating list features can reap huge benefits when it comes to SEO and readability.
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