Update your web pages content following the best SEO practices
As our blog now has about 110 published posts. We are new, so we will not update any post on our blog soon, but we can bring you many examples for previous clients’ websites.
And if you look at the traffic trends over the past three years, you’ll see that nearly all of our republic pages have consistently been gaining more and more search traffic over time.
Now the best part about this SEO strategy is that increases in traffic can happen almost immediately.
As you can see here.
So if you want to know how to get organic traffic fast by simply refreshing older content, stay tuned.
When you update content, you can’t just recreate any old page and expect to get a quick boost in organic traffic.
There are some requirements in page selection, and you need to update the content with some thought.
Plus, your website should follow the basic SEO best practices, at least, so you should have good content.
It is a technically sound website and has some website authority, meaning you’re not a new site or have no links pointing at any of your pages.
Updating content isn’t a magic trick that will send a significant flow of new organic traffic to your website. So if you are weak on these criteria, better reading also our other guides about it. I’ll link those up here.
But if your site matches these criteria.
Let’s get started with the first step.
- Find the pages where your content is responsible for underperformance
- Backlink associated aspects
- It’s time to revitalize your page
- The content-type
- The material format
- The content angle
- Analyze the top-ranking relevant pages
- Take action identifying the keywords
- Find more pertinent keywords
- Concentrate more on off-page SEO as you are republishing, take this chance
Step 1. Find the pages where your content is responsible for underperformance
Content is a massive contributor to every website ranking success.
But, it’s not always going to be the real reason, or let’s better say, the main reason you’re not ranking in google’s first page and the top positions.
So the first thing you will have to do is to identify that a content issue exists, and there are four main things to look out for.
First, check the age of your page. It takes time to acquire backlinks and for Google to crawl and understand where your page fits in the SERP.
1. You should give your page around six to 12 months to rank before considering a major update. (we see that there is an average of 35 weeks on a new website for each page to reach at least 90% of its ranking potential, still, if everything was done correct whet creating that web page.
You need to check that the page is targeting a relevant keyword.
Relevant keyword: a topic that has the potential to get search traffic.
For example, this post on how to start a link building campaign fast isn’t targeting a keyword. So we wouldn’t update it to get more organic traffic.
You should be able to tell right away whether you’re targeting a keyword from your page title and URL.
But if you’re not 100% sure, you can double-check if the topic has traffic potential by going over this specific article to follow the step and an actionable keyword research system that brings valuable results for your content ROI.
Using MOZ extension, you can see the amount of search traffic the top-ranking pages get. And now, you need to assess whether the topic is worth updating based on the time and resources required for the potential traffic gain. (again, keep an eye on your possible content ROI).
With the correct search, you will see that this process is not only about updating pages with traffic potential.
For example, we create a case study we did brought us to create, for a travel website, several’ ‘how to go” article that delivered many high ranking posts, helped the website building links, contributed a lot to the overall website ranking position, delivering strength to many other existing pagers of the website (which we also updated).
This process generated tremendous and constant growth in traffic.
So keep in mind is the ROI that needs to drive your decisions on what pages to update.
You can follow here the process we used:
Make sure your page isn’t already ranking in the top three for its target keyword minor updates are usually excellent, but generally speaking, if you’re already ranking in the top positions, you probably don’t want to do a full rewrite and potentially lose those rankings.
You can use Google Search Console or Ranktrackr.com to follow the page performance or search results report to ensure that you have clear data about the average position selected.
Usually, we combine these 2 data to create a broad picture of the results.
Ideally, you want to find pages, where you’re not ranking in the top three for your primary keyword and an easy way to spot this is to look at the page URLs, along with the top keyword and its position.
Once you find a post that can benefit from an update, you can see with Ranktrackr.com if the search results for that page match the search intent and the content there is already on the page, title, URL, and so on.
Analyze the situation with the target keyword!
If those matching points are not clear for the keyword you are targeting, there’s a good chance it’s ranking lower than you would like.
See the exact keywords you are targeting and the actual ranking in the search.
A page like this checks all the boxes that we’ve gone through so far.
Older than 9/12 months since our last major update.
It’s targeting an important keyword.
It’s an underperforming page.
Step 2. Backlink associated aspects
At last, you need to get sure to learn how diverse backlinks the existing top-level pages have and examine the quality of those links.
Discover all the ranking pages of SEO metrics. The central parameters you are looking for are the variety of referring domains, which are distinct sites that connect to the page domain.
The total strength of a website’s backlink profile.
The URL score represents the overall strength of a pages backlink profile.
In our studies, we have seen numerous cases where a page metric was exposing a page with lots of unique referring domains with also high site authority, yet other lower site’s pages outranked the page.
Now, you might not have the ability to rank in the very first position, ok.
Still, for sure you will be able to get a dive from your current position to higher, with a considerable jump in traffic for a topic that has a great deal of company value for your business. (If you are at this point and you have followed the previous actions extremely thoroughly).
Therefore, this page you are taking a look at right now can take advantage of an update.
Link at the keywords article.
Alright, so now we’ve determined the page to upgrade.
Step 3. It’s time to revitalize your page
And again, this requires a little research and decision making.
The first thing you’ll wish to do is examine search intent and make certain your page matches it.
Browse intent means to reason behind a searcher’s query.
And the best method to do this is to look at the top-ranking pages and identify the mani characteristics of search intent.
The content-type
Content-type can usually be categorized into
- Article
- Item pages
- Category pages
- Landing pages
Based on the SERP, see what kind of pages Google chooses to show concerning the particular keyword and page you have to rejuvenate.
The material format.
And this uses more to:
- Blog posts
- Landing pages
A couple of common blog formats you’ll see are” how-to” tutorials list posts and viewpoint editorials.
Common formats for a landing page are something like a calculator or a tool.
In your case, discover what material mix Google is showing.
If, for example, you’ll see a mixture of complete guides and several” what is” type posts, 1″ how-to” format, and your page is a” how-to” short article then is ideal.
If this was not the case, you might believe in rejuvenating your page, including your tone as you are producing something completely new, but you will go to insert in your page all sort of format mix you discover in google’s first page.
The content angle.
The content angle is typically depicted in the title as the advantage.
It’s essentially your hook or the: “why somebody ought to click on your posts.”
The angle likewise highly determines who the search engine result are targeting. What sort of visitors is having that search intent, more of a beginner’s audience, or an innovative audience?
Example:
If you have already written your article for beginners, but you also see in the SERP some results targeting expert audience and are ranking higher than you, you can understand what you are missing in your content.
You can now include in your updated content, more info, and paragraphs related to keywords targeting experts. This is a simple process that can become very familiar and easy to apply. We can go through this together just 1 or 2 times, and you will see it is intuitive and logical.
We’ve gone with the angle of building high-quality links at scale, which probably isn’t appealing or helpful for a beginner.
Overall, our post matches search intent, but it also tells me that we’re likely missing a lot of depth and context for beginner-level audiences who, in my opinion, are searching for the quarry guest blogging.
Another interesting observation from the SERP is that the what is guest blogging pages are ranking higher than the more authoritative pages with significantly fewer referring domains. Something to consider is that these pages may serve searcher intent, better than the other pages.
So if we were to update this page, we probably include a short section on what guest blogging is within the content.
So bottom line. If your page isn’t perfectly matching searcher intent, then your traffic and rankings will be limited.
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Step 4. The next thing
Analyze the top-ranking relevant pages.
Now since we’ve already pinpointed that we have a content issue, rather than links or technical related ones, we need to see what the top-ranking pages are doing right.
So this would require you to manually visit the pages and analyze critical points that are being made.
Get a good understanding of the structure and key talking points of the pages.
The most natural place to start is to look at heading text because it’ll tell you the main points discussed throughout the post, bullet points, and lists.
Put now these headings and phrases in a Google Sheet.
Now you can see the similar topics that are covered by the top-ranking pages.
Include sections in your new refreshed article to cover all the headings and topics your are not covering now, so-called ”the missing point s in your article”.
At last, please do not forget to analyze the pages backlink profile.
Since we’re updating a page and we’ve ruled out that links aren’t the reason for the pages underperformance. It’s worth looking at the backlinks of the pages to see why people link to it.
For example, if you have a post that includes stats, and people link to you because of that stat.
Generally speaking, you should include it in your updated post, so the link stays relevant.
Now, I want to be sure you understand. You do not have to include everything you find in the top-ranking pages to add support to your new page. Add all content you that can be relevant, that can add value and makes sense with the context of your page.
Now you can republish your post and submit it for re-indexing.
With WordPress, you can change your publishing date to the current date.
You can now resubmit your URL in Google Search Console to request re-indexing.
You can also wait for Google to recrawl the page.
Now, we require to make sure that it’s easier for search engines to comprehend what your page is about and develop that new and added content that matches what we call the searchers intent.
We also need to show Google and other online search engines that your page is worthy of ranking.
Let’s say that I’m a new and wedding organizer, and I live in Phuket, Thailand.
I’m starting my new wedding organizer company plan to improve my client base with a marketing method.
I have a 4 years old website with old blog posts and pages. I don’t have any pals, so recommendations are out of the concern.
Step 5. Take action identifying the keywords
Find pertinent keywords that individuals are looking for and see how these search queries suit your business.
The simplest method to start discovering appropriate keywords is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential consumer.
So I would think that a bride or groom trying to find some magical wedding place and pictures would look for a professional wedding planner in Phuket.
I will also change the nation to Thailand because people in other countries, they probably aren’t trying to find a Phuket based wedding event coordinator typically.
Now I’ll run the search, and you can see that there are only around 600 or so month-to-month searches for this keyword phrase.
However, looking below, you’ll see that there are various related topics and subjects for a single query.
We can check out together all the keywords variations and localizations figuring out where you can rank for your target keyword.
Now we can see the top 10 Google rankings for your target keyword and a bunch of keyword metrics, Traffic, and keywords.
We can have a look at these ranking pages to see that they produce Traffic every single month.
And next to that, you’ll see that each page individually ranks for numerous keywords with different keywords in the ranking positions in Google search.
This is an excellent thing to do since you already understand that Google is ranking the single page for all of the keywords, so why wouldn’t you be able to rank for these keywords, and maybe even more.
All right, now that we have a list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your pages in search engine optimization.
As we comprehend the keywords that people are searching for in Google, it gives us evidence on the language we should apply to let both Google and potential customers learn what your page is about.
You don’t have to apply your precise match keywords since Google has become rather smart at recognizing what your page is about.
It’s essential to remark that you shouldn’t try to deceive Google by utilizing keywords where they don’t belong.
Your priority should be to optimize for your readers and visitors.
Here’s an example of what you shouldn’t do. I’m a Phuket wedding planner that does Phuket wedding planning for your Phuket wedding.
This is known as keyword stuffing. It does more harm than good.
Important tip.
- Remember also to better optimize your meta descriptions. When you take a look at the Google search results, you’ll see this part in blue, and the text listed under the top section is your title tag. The additional element is the meta description.
- The purpose of these is to entice somebody to click through to your page, and if individuals are, in fact, clicking through to your page, then that’s informing Google that your page is likely pertinent to the reason that they had looked for the query in the first place.
Create a title like award-winning Phuket wedding planner, a realistic but amazing eye-catching title
Make me as a customer want to discover out who this awesome wedding planner is.
And keep in mind, your task is to help Google finest identify your page as being relevant to the user’s search question.
Remember to examine all your very first page rivals keyword rankings and see if any other ideas might help Google much better understand what your page is about.
As you’re composing the copy for your page, you might want to keep these in mind and spray them in where it makes sense and reads naturally to visitors.
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Step 6. Concentrate more on off-page SEO as you are republishing, take this chance
Once you have added all this targeted content to better complete your page, you can now concentrate on off-page SEO, link building process.
It works in a similar way that you would refer your friend to buy a product from whatever store because you’ve tried it, use it, and loved it.
In general, the more quality backlinks you can get from relevant pages, the higher you’ll rank in Google.
Focusing on quality, you’ll probably prioritize editorial links, and the leading way to get links from other people’s blogs is through something that SEO is often referred to as outreach.
Excellent outreach prospects you can find are your local partner businesses in a lateral non-competing niche. So as a wedding planner, you might want to contact other local flower shops, local venues, local restaurants or decor shops, beauty salons, wedding photographers, and so on.
Start to exchange links with these business websites to form meaningful relationships. You can pass on referrals to each other.
You can link back to each other as a preferred vendor or link to others’ content and guest posts, where it’s relevant. And this isn’t limited to just local businesses.
This applies to everyone. Find some trustworthy partners who are on that same journey as you in a lateral niche and help each other out.
From here you can just rinse and repeat the keyword research process the on-page optimization tips and continually build links to your content and articles and start climbing the Google search rankings.
How often should website content be upgraded?
Regular website updates are not constantly sufficient to maintain your website executing as it should, and a new website is often called for. As a common rule, I suggest a website redesign or spruce up every 3-4 years. The Internet is always transforming, and so are its search engines.
How do you evaluate Web content?
- Skim reviewed
- Look for the response to your question
- Consider the trustworthiness of the writer or website
- Consider the function of the site
- Look for the date
- Crosscheck
How can SEO impact on how typically you upgrade your website content?
Upgrading your content is something you need to do. So, if you enhance your content and become an expert of SEO, your messages will certainly be seen much faster, and higher positions make sure to follow. Google algorithm favours regular updates.
How do you upgrade old content?
Collect Your Data. The initial inquiry is, which posts are the ones you should optimize?
- Find the Right Pages to Update.
- Update Your Keyword Research.
- Analyze Search Intent.
- Improve Your Headlines.
- Update the Content.
- Remember Your On-Page SEO.
- Improve Your Calls to Action.
We have a ton of really helpful articles and guides where we expand on these topics.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or write to me!
