Upgrading your website’s information and materials frequently is one of the most crucial tactics for raising your SEO rankings.
To my knowledge, after dealing with numerous website owners throughout the years, I can attest that this is exactly the thing that most of them do not perform well, if at all.
This is likely because most people prefer to play SEO like a quota game. As in, put up an article, get that freshness scoring, get in the keywords, and consider it a job well done! Certainly doable in specific industries where competition is low and posting up decent information (without any further updates) will actually perform well.
But when push comes to shove, you’ll want to maximize everything. That’s when revisiting old content and updating it might just do wonders for your SEO ranking.
So in this post, we will cover the importance of updating your content for SEO rankings and provide you with some advice on how to do so successfully.
Why is Updating Content Important for SEO Ranking?
In short, search engines especially Google will give high priority to websites with recently updated content. This only makes sense. If you were in charge of a search engine, would you ever want your top rankings to be dominated by outdated, smelly content? If you did so, users will eventually abandon your search engine services for something better.
Google, like any business, is afraid of losing customers. So it goes out of its way to ensure high-quality content. And, among other things, high quality in this case means showing updated, curated, fresh content. It’s really that simple.
Based on Google’s documentation on search quality evaluator guidelines, you’ll find that everything I have mentioned above is absolutely true.
In fact, updating content is usually cited as an important factor by many SEO consultants. For example as depicted (as the 1st point) on this SEMRush infographic below:
Beyond The Algorithm
OK, so it’s great for the search algorithm. But the benefits really go further than that.
- Retarget keywords to improve your website’s ranking.
- Raise the relevancy of your website to readers.
- Introduce new LSI keywords and phrases that are trending today.
- Improve on readability and scannability of your articles.
For example, assuming that you have an old dusty generic article on say… “Leather Wallets” that was written in the distant past. But maybe “Custom Embossed Leather Wallets” have been trending lately and so it’s due time to update that old piece of work to make it new and trendy and everything that the crowd wants to read these days.
Another benefit of updating your content is that it can improve your website’s user experience (UX). When you provide your visitors with fresh and relevant content, you keep them engaged and coming back for more. This has nothing to do with playing the algorithm, but everything to do with engaging actual human interests.
Have faith that people do recognize when they are reading quality content, or not.
Tips on Updating Your Content
Updating your content for SEO ranking doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. Here are some tips to help you get started:
It Doesn’t have to be ‘Old’
So here’s the thing – updating old content doesn’t mean it has to actually be old. You can totally update content that you posted just last week or even yesterday! As long as you are constantly improving it. Believe it or not, those busybody Googlebots know everything that you are doing to your content. And the more you improve stuff, the more they will approve of your site.
Do a Content Audit
It’s necessary to perform a content audit before you begin updating your material in order to determine which content needs to be updated or refreshed. Use resources like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to discover underperforming pages and areas for development.
Concentrate on Quality
Rather than just adding new content while upgrading your content, concentrate on raising its overall quality. Ensure that your content is well-written, educational, and captivating. For example, break up your text and make it easier to read, and use bullet points, illustrations, and subheadings. Fix grammar and spelling mistakes, or add more images. The objective is to make it more interesting to viewers.
Include New Trendy Keywords
Update your material with new keywords and phrases that are pertinent to your target audience. However, be careful not to overdo them as this is known as keyword stuffing and can lower the ranks of your website. Of course, you’ll want to add new information such as fresh data, case studies, or viewpoints from subject-matter specialists.
Improve on Scannability and Readability
It may be tempting to use industry jargon and technical language in your articles. But this only serves to alienate your audience. It is better to go for short, concise sentences that get straight to the point without flowery sentences. Also, note that most readers do not actually read, but rather they scan your articles – looking mainly at titles, subtitles, bold/underline text and bullet points. And you can surely update old content to better fit the reading habits of the current era.
Check for Structured Data
Structured data is based on schema.org and Google has branded theirs as Rich Snippets. While updating older content, you may want to look into this. Rich snippets are a fantastic method to raise your website’s visibility and click-through rate, therefore you should try to optimise for them during this process.
In Summary
Google pays high attention to how fresh or updated your content is. There is no way to ‘cheat’ around this as the machine simply knows. There was a time when black hatters would get around this by posting fake updates such as changing the timestamps, or by simply changing an image. Basically just making superficial changes to fool the crawlers. This no longer works and Google expects proper and substantial updates to qualify.
As an avid gamer, I would like to propose an analogy to this issue. In gaming terms, we can choose to either build our roster of characters tall or wide. By going tall we level up one single character to godly status. By going wide, we spread the experience points between all characters. Updating a post is like going tall, where you make one article immensely powerful. And in contrast, posting article after article every week is going for the wide strategy. Now if you are a gamer yourself, you will understand how going tall is usually the method of choice to ‘break’ the game and become overpowered in the end.
Neil Patel is a leader in digital marketing and SEO, and this is what he has to say about updating old content.
If you don’t want to update previous content for some reason, then here is an article about “Ways to Improve SEO Without Rewriting Your Website Content”. (But really, updating old information on your site is very, very recommended).
Learn more about this and related SEO stuff in our course.
