Content refreshing is one of the best ways to increase traffic of your existing content, and it’s also a great way to keep the information on your website fresh and up to date. However, the process isn’t always straightforward. For example, some people worry about tanking their organic traffic if they update the content (a valid concern). Other people find that it just doesn’t bring the dramatic traffic increase that some marketing experts promise. Fortunately for you, I’ve been both of those people. I’ve updated probably more than 50 blog posts in the past 12 months, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes.
However I’ve also
Seen outstanding results, such as content that drives 10 times more traffic and soars in rankings. That said, I really wanted to know why some posts perform dramatically company data better post-update than others. So I did a data study on what makes some content dramatically more successful post-update and why others continue to flounder. Using this data, I’ve come up with a content refreshing strategy that has significantly improved my success rate. Today, I want to share that strategy with you. In this article, we’ll cover the following: Contrary to popular belief, not all blog posts are worth updating. This is one of the single most impactful realizations that has improved my success rate.
I only recommend
Prioritizing updates for old content that earned 20+ monthly visitors at peak performance. Why? In the data study mentioned above, 45% of the updated posts had Text Services fewer than 20 visitors per month pre-update. Unfortunately, this 45% of updated posts only contributed 15% of the total traffic increase (of a 96% total organic traffic increase). That means blog posts that already had 20+ monthly visitors before the update contributed the majority of the total organic traffic increase.
So what should you do with blog posts that have fewer than 20 monthly visitors? Assuming these posts are targeting keywords that are valuable to your business or contain important thought leadership ideas, it’s definitely worth updating them. In addition, a smaller blog will generally have a lot more blog posts with fewer than 20 monthly visitors simply because it needs time to gain traction. Therefore, it’s still worthwhile to update them, but prioritize posts with the most potential first.
