Few Considerations for Refreshing your Website's Existing Posts or Articles

Sometimes, writing new content is not the best way to increase the acquisition of new or existing readers on your site, what if your existing content even proved to convert your reader to whatever goal is relevant to your site.

Existing articles that drove traffic in the past are likely to work again compared to completely new, untested ones. That’s why the refactoring of your old content is a worthwhile effort and must be part of your overall content strategy. Sometimes, a good update on existing content is all that it takes to capitalize on its proven value and further grow its impact.

Plus, keeping outdated content hurts your brand.

Generally, how to update your old content depends on the content you want to update. That’s pretty obvious but needs to be said. The key is to do whatever it takes to keep it relevant for your readers and ensure that it is getting better and outperform the competition.

The content is no longer relevant to a reader? Then delete the page and 301 redirect it to the most relevant URL on your site or update it to make it relevant.

Here’s a quick list of a few things you can consider to improve your old content:

Can you make the content more actionable and useful? One way is to make it more useful by adding some infographics, step-by-step instructions, checklists, or videos to the article. Are there any dead links in the content? Check and fix them because they hurt the reader’s experience.

• Do you have a global audience and some articles are translated? Make sure the language in images or videos is consistent with the language of the page.
• What do the pages ranking in the top 10 of the thematics of your article do better? Scan the search results for the 3 to 5 main search terms each article ranks for.
• Can you make the article simpler? Remove convoluted phrasing and avoid using words that add unnecessary complexity. Simpler is better.
• Does the article discuss a time-specific topic or is it only relevant for a certain year or time frame? Does it mention the time, then maybe you can update it for the current year or time frame and see if further improvement is needed to keep the subject relevant. You can also try making the article more “evergreen” by avoiding the usage of dates or specific time ranges, if possible.
• If the article covers a specific problem people face, make sure you search if the solution you proposed is still the best at this moment in time. Look for popular answers on Quora or another platform to have a sense of what people are ideally looking for to solve the problem.
• Is your article seriously overlaps another one? Are you covering the same concept in another article on your site? If so, consider merging them and use a 301 redirect on one URL to the other.

Hopefully, going through these few points will provide you with a method or checklist to improve your existing content. Good luck.