To improve your SEO results, fix outdated content.
Your website likely contains a mountain of published material if your business has been around for longer than a year or two. Because so much of that information is out-of-date or unrelated, it no longer benefits your audience or your brand.
However, it doesn’t hurt at all, right?
Wrong. The search rankings and user experience of your content may be badly impacted by outdated content.
For instance, published content may contain links to articles, studies, or other helpful websites. Pages go offline over time for many reasons. These links might now lead to pages that no longer exist. As a result, your search ranking suffers since Google dislikes content with broken links. They are not well received by audiences either.
Furthermore, your material may cover subjects that don’t align with your company’s present marketing or content strategies. It would be undesirable for those pages to appear in searches.
Many brands are reluctant to remove information, yet the outcomes are frequently pleasantly surprising. For instance, HubSpot removed over 3000 pieces of old material. The business noticed an improvement in its SEO results in just a few months.
Conduct a content audit first.
Despite what HubSpot has learned, you shouldn’t erase all of your previous material. Much of the information you’ve already provided can be enhanced to boost SEO and the audience experience.
Fortunately, there are numerous techniques to enhance already published material in order to boost SEO. Even better, information that has been appropriately maintained or renovated can benefit you just as much as fresh postings. For instance, according to Search Engine Journal, periodically deleting or updating outdated information may increase page traffic to your site and improve SEO. You could eventually save your brand money by putting these tactics into practice.
You must first locate the erroneous or out-of-date content if you intend to cut it with digital scissors. You must thus audit your content. Every piece of content on your website, whether it be blog posts, tutorials, or interview articles, should ideally be reviewed to determine what still benefits your target audience by establishing authority or by providing information. Start with one content area, such as blog posts, and then extend from there if the volume of content makes that effort too challenging.
Remove or move content that is:
- no longer applicable due to modifications to your business or shifting industry trends
- Not useful to the people you now want to reach
The SEO boosting strategies listed below may help the material you choose to preserve.
Update and republish quality but outdated material.
What should you do with your archived blog articles and other reliable content that you wish to keep? Republish them since Google favours recently published material.
However, don’t simply repost them on your website because that will quickly result in a ranking penalty in the eyes of Google’s computerised search engine algorithm.
Refresh the article instead by:
- Adding new sentences
- Updates to current ones
- Including fresh links and images
After that, post your excellent material again with the current date. After revising more than 20 previous blog entries, Databox, a well-liked dashboard platform for organisations, noticed a 75% boost in website traffic.
As you work on upgrading older information, keep the following options in mind.
In the content you’re maintaining, remove any references to dated statistics.
Look through posts that are largely truthful and reliable. Edit out any incorrect information or dated references that may be present.
Consider that you’ve written a fantastic blog post for your small business about how to use a particular product. Although the article is still current, it contains information from five years ago. To benefit your brand, remove such phrases.
By doing this, you may avoid having broken links negatively affect your content. Additionally, it stops your target market from reading out-of-date material and drawing the wrong inferences about the legitimacy or authority of your brand.
By changing those out-of-date references or data pieces with more recent ones, you can improve the SEO value of previously published pages.
Go online and look for current, correct, and relevant references to replace each one that was removed. This ensures that your links point to reliable sources and that they are not broken.
Review and update evergreen posts as well, don’t forget.
Read over old postings to look for references that aren’t relevant or convincing anymore. Take into account the market, its trends, and the search terms used by your target audience.
Put on your editor’s cap and start working after that. Cut the fat from outdated material, add new words expressing fresh ideas, and more without altering the essentials of previously published works. This will take you less time than if you were to develop new content while enhancing the SEO for your company.
Include fresh SEO keywords and links.
Finally, by including recently discovered SEO keywords and links, you can refresh outdated material and increase its worth for search engine optimization.
You can leverage the keyword research you’ve already done to improve older material if you’re still constantly producing new content as part of your content strategy. To make older blogs more relevant and authoritative than before, consider replacing or adding new keywords, and think about including a few new, high-authority links within older blogs.
Finally,
Making outdated material relevant to your target audience again requires work. However, upgrading existing material and removing outdated content can work wonders for your content marketing plan.
Without spending money on new material, you might increase organic traffic to your website and better meet the demands of your audience. See the outcomes for yourself by putting these tactics to use.