Ever since Google folded its Freshness Update into the algorithm, being current has mattered a great deal for every website.
Picture yourself typing “population of New York” into Google and being shown the figure from ten years ago. Content like that, carrying a timestamp that no longer holds, needs to be reworked.
The freshness update made sense at the time and it still does, because 15 percent of the searches Google sees every day have never been asked before.
If you came here to read this, I am fairly sure you have a stack of blog posts sitting on your site. So how do you keep them alive and current?
In this piece for the Türk SEM blog we walk you through how to optimize your old blog posts, and how refreshing content that has gone stale can move you up the results page. Read on.
How Do You Keep Your Website Fresh?
If you want one blunt answer, it is this: publish more, more often. Up to a point that is genuinely true.
Researchers at HubSpot went through blogging data from more than 13,500 of the company’s customers. The study found that businesses publishing more than 16 posts a month pulled in 3.5 times more traffic than businesses publishing only 0 to 4 posts a month. That gap is enormous.
And it is not only about visitors. Companies publishing more than 16 posts a month also brought in 4.5 times more new leads. I have to underline how much weight this carries. Keep reading closely.
What Should You Do With Old Posts and Content?
Writing new posts looks like a fine SEO strategy. What to do with the content you already have is the subject of this section. I covered a few finer points I am skipping here on our podcast on Spotify (in Turkish), and you may want to listen.
Will you let that content quietly slip out of search over time, or will you delete it? What happens when you delete old content, and what happens when you leave it on your site?
To answer that, let us travel back to the day Google shipped the Panda update and look at the detail. The mission of that update was filtering out low quality sites, meaning spam sites.
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites, in other words spam sites (sites which add little value for users, sites that copy content from other websites or sites that are simply not very useful).
At the same time it would provide better rankings for high quality sites carrying valuable content (sites with original content and information such as research, in depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on), and that is exactly what happened.”
Plenty of high performing sites that had been pulling strong traffic before the update were hit hard. The only route back to their old glory was producing high quality content people would actually find useful.
With Panda in mind, you might conclude that deleting your thin, aimless pages, the ones nobody can explain the purpose of, is the sensible way to protect your rankings. (That conclusion changes later in this piece, and the correct move turns out to be updating the content properly. Deleting only held up for a short window right after Panda first landed.)
Google itself said the point of Panda was getting rid of poor quality content. “Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.“
Then a Google representative, Gary Illyes, posted that escaping Panda’s wrath was not about scrapping every weak old page, but about refreshing what the site already had, and that single message changed the whole approach for SEO practitioners. Updating content and writing stronger pieces has been the core job ever since.
So the dilemma about what to do with an old page resolves like this: every thin page, meaning pages with almost no substance or none at all, and every low quality page that helps nobody, has to be updated. That work lifts the quality of the content and the quality of the site along with it. Whatever it takes, turn your site into one that is full of solid content.
Why Optimize Instead of Deleting?
You may be wondering why you should optimize an old post when you could simply publish a new one.
The short answer is that your old content is an SEO treasury, and it can win rankings with far less effort. At Türk SEM we run this old content optimization process with every client we work with. Deleting is something we do very, very rarely.
(We only delete when we think a piece has no business being on the site at all.)
On top of that, no matter how much you publish, growth flattens out at some point, and the way past that plateau is reworking what you already have.
Revising old content leaves visitors, customers and search engines with the impression of a strong, dependable company.
Türk SEM SEO Manager Tahir Dinç
HubSpot noticed that 76 percent of its monthly blog views came from old posts, and that 92 percent of its monthly blog leads came from “old blog posts” too, and got to work. Once the team saw what that older content was worth, it went back and revised those posts, and doubled the traffic they brought in.
How to Optimize Your Old Blog Posts
I assume you are convinced by now that your old content needs work (I hope so), so let us look at where to start.
Or were you thinking of changing the dates and republishing the same text?
That is not going to get you anywhere. Reworking the whole piece is the process you actually need. I know it is laborious, but there is no way around it. Roll up your sleeves, do the research and revise the page properly.
1. Audit Every Page
To decide which content to refresh, start by analyzing your site and checking which pages are doing any work.
Metrics such as page views, click through rate and engagement tell you how each page is performing, and Google Analytics, Search Console and many other analytics tools report them.
Neil Patel argues that Google Search Console is the best tool for reaching workable data about your content, because it lets you go 16 months back and compare the differences. Tahir Dinç of Türk SEM picks Google Analytics instead. Choose between the two and start digging.
We will work through Google Search Console here, because the stretch of time before your analytics code was installed matters to us. If you bought the site from someone else, that older history will not exist in your analytics tool. Search Console is the only place you can reach it.
If you want to rethink your SEO steps, you can work through the “Strong SEO Methodology” we developed ourselves. To learn the steps: /en/seo
2. Compare the Metrics
The next step is comparing the traffic your old posts pulled year by year, and noting the pages that were once popular but no longer bring in what they used to.
To do that, move through the data by date range and watch the visitor curves. Search Console lets you follow the entire history of a given page.
Your analysis will show you the exact year and month a page started to slide.
Once you have found those declining pages, go through every page that collects plenty of impressions but has a weak click through rate.
Here is what is going on with a page whose click through rate is low: something is wrong with the title or the description shown in the results (the title tag especially), or more precisely there is no headline that gives people a reason to visit your site. Update your title and your meta description. While you are in there, you may as well update the content too.
3. Update the Old Posts
We now have two sets of pages:
- Pages whose impressions have fallen over time
- Pages with high impressions but a low click through rate
Some pages will still look healthy, and we can assume they have not gone stale yet, which means there is no need to overhaul them. If I were you, I would reshare those older but still productive pages on your social accounts.
It is time to update the pages you flagged as problems. Some of them were badly written from the start, and clearing those out and writing them again from scratch can give your site a much better piece.
If your page presents research, do not forget to cite the source. If you are quoting an academic paper, say which paper it is.
One Last Thing: Great Content, Falling Traffic
Friends, the root cause here is weak engagement. The piece you wrote may be excellent research and genuinely useful. And yet the language is heavy, and the opening paragraph is hard work to get through. Check that first paragraph: does it read in a way that keeps someone going? If it does not, replace it right away with something plainer and easier to follow. Give people a reason to keep reading, and set out carefully what they will know once they finish.
To review your whole writing process, have a look at how to write an SEO friendly article and what the core criteria are.
Another answer to this problem is enriching the page with material that lifts engagement. You can put a form in front of readers so they can reach extra material such as an ebook or a PDF deck.
Pulling visitors to the page can also help. Sending traffic to it through Google Ads Search, Google Ads Display, social media ads or email marketing is often worth trying.
Our piece on SEM covers paid advertising in detail.
If you want to read it: /en/sem
One more thing: link internally from your new posts to the older pages you consider successful.
Friends, that is everything we wanted to cover here. I hope you found the answers you came for. If there is something you would like to tell us, you can reach us through the contact page or write in the comments below.
And yes, I know. Turksem.com has old pages of its own that we need to update…
