Updating Older Content to Increase Search Engine Rank

Updating your existing content might be the change your content strategy needs

Updating content on your website may not be something you think about often. After all, you’re always being told by digital marketing companies to focus on creating new and engaging content. While it’s true that your business does need new and engaging content on a continual basis, updating older existing content can actually be really beneficial. Updating older content is a cost-effective way to use existing assets to boost search engine rank and engage customers and leads.

So, I want you to think about when was the last time you wrote any content or had content written for your website. Maybe it was a page on your site like a service page or a blog post. Could be anything. Now, when that page gets crawled by Google, Bing, or whatever, it gets indexed. This index is what search engines draw from in order to serve pages on the web.

The content on each page that gets indexed is essentially a snapshot of what the search engine sees. A search engine bases its ranking partially on this snapshot. There are other variables that can change like backlinks and so on, but when it comes to on-page SEO and content, what’s there when the indexing takes place is what the search engine bases its results on.

Updating your site’s content updates search engines to boost rank

Updating Search Engines

So, one of the reasons we might want to update our content is to take advantage of keywords. At Charlotte Content Marketing, we provide an initial assessment and audit of the existing content on our clients’ sites. We then do keyword research and discuss our goals and strategies with each client. From there, we write content, whether that be website content, blog posts, or landing pages, and we measure the performance of the content and the performance of the site as a whole, not just against our keywords, but also against competitor sites.

In doing this, we can often find opportunities that may not have been present at first to pull ahead of the competition. This means we often have to update the content on a site, maybe even multiple times, to refresh it in Google, Bing, and others. Once the updates are made, we then manually submit our pages so that the changes take effect faster. Now, this can take a little bit of time depending on which search engine we’re talking about. In our experience, Bing takes forever to handle manual updates, but they do have an API for immediate submission when changes occur.

Making the Content More Valuable

Another reason we may want to update our content is when we can add more information to make the content more valuable. So, for instance, if we’re working with a software development client and new technologies get added to the client’s stack, it may be worth adding this information depending on what’s trending at the moment. This new information can make older content more valuable by presenting facts, asking new questions, or positioning points in a different light.

We have to keep in mind that digital content is made for people. Our team certainly takes into account how our content development practices affect our clients’ SEO and page rank, but we also factor in things like brand authority and engagement. Content serves so many purposes on the web, and we use it strategically to accomplish specific goals. After all, that’s what content marketing is at its core.

Updating content is often necessary when you update goals

Defining Goals Over Time

One of these goals is to rank higher in search results. Another goal is to increase engagement to drive conversions for purchases. Another reason is to encourage conversions for newsletter sign-ups and other on-page actions. Yet another reason is to demonstrate authority and provide customers with helpful content that they will want to share with others. Whether they share the content through word-of-mouth marketing or they actually share the content on socials, the point remains the same – we’re writing for humans as well as search engines to accomplish goals, and these goals may change with time. That’s when we update existing content.

A Shift in Content Strategy

Still, another reason to update content is if our strategy changes. So, let’s say one of our clients is opening a new location in a different city. Our market research leads us to understand that the demographic there heavily skews toward tech content. So, we will shift our focus toward tech with future content.

But, this doesn’t mean our old content is now useless. We can repurpose older content by rewriting it with a tech focus. Now, we don’t spin the content; what we mean by that is simply replacing adjectives, superlatives, and stuff. That kind of thing leads to penalties and lower search engine rank. We also can’t duplicate the content because search engines are only going to rank one version of the content, so that’s a waste of time.

When we repurpose content and rewrite the topic from a tech perspective, we can now update our content with a different approach to get better traction in the new location. This does require more time than simply spinning or duplicating content, but the effect it can have in the new location is worth the investment. Beyond that, the time it takes is not nearly as long as coming up with new content.

Updated pages get preferences from servers

Fresh Content Gets Served First

So, those are just a few reasons you would want to keep your content updated. It’s also worth noting that search engines look for updated content when serving pages. This means they’re usually going to prefer fresh content over older content. One strategy we use is to update evergreen content from time to time to keep it ranking, and this usually doesn’t require an entire rewrite or reworking of the content either, so it saves our clients a bit on costs while taking advantage of the work they already have.

Contact Charlotte Content Marketing

To learn more about how updating your existing content can help your brand improve search engine rank and enhance engagement opportunities, call Charlotte Content Marketing at (704) 323-6762, or click to schedule your consultation through our convenient online contact form.