Writing and publishing great content for your brand can help you reach your target audience online. You can use your content to spread your brand messaging and educate users on the benefits they can enjoy once they buy your products or pay for your services.

Additionally, having great content on your website will help you build authority. This gives you more chances of being trusted by search engines and shown higher on SERPs.

Content Relevance

Simply writing articles and other content is not enough. You need to prepare an effective content strategy, which you can use in planning blogs and other posts for your business.

Part of this strategy should be ensuring that the content on your website is always relevant. This is important because search engines look at the freshness of your content.

Most of the time, they prioritise content that contains newer and more updated resources and information. Articles and blogs that meet these criteria have greater chances of outperforming articles that have been published some time ago.

Keeping your content relevant is also essential because available information can change over time. Sometimes, there are changes in your company or the industry you belong to. New research and discovery in your field may also make the information on your existing content obsolete.

The best way of ensuring that the articles on your website are relevant is by refreshing your content regularly. This process will not only help you address the datedness of your articles, but it will also allow you to correct any errors in your content and apply any feedback that you got when you first published it.

Know Which Pieces of Content to Update

You do not need to refresh all of your existing articles. To make your job easier, you can use analytic tools to determine which pieces of content need refreshing the most. You can do this by looking at your data and finding articles that:

  • Have or had some recurring traffic
  • Have been in decline for at least three successive months
  • Gains at least 1% of your total content traffic

Big but Doable Ways To Refresh Your Content

There are three main ways that you can refresh the articles on your website. Each method involves taking existing content on your website and working on it to update its relevance, whether in terms of SEO or information.

Expansion

The first method of refreshing the existing content on your website is by expanding it. This entails making an article bigger, broader, longer, and more comprehensive.

Let us say that you have written an article containing 10 pieces of advice for a beginner in digital marketing. You can expand your content by explaining each piece of advice more and provide supporting information that can drive your point home for your target audience.

You can also add more tips that your readers can follow. There may be five or more additional pieces of advice that you learned about ever since you wrote the article, which might be useful to a beginner digital marketer.

Another way of expanding your existing content is by merging it with another article. This can be done for content with duplicate or overlapping topics.

Update

Writing about advice is a great way of catching your target audience’s attention. However, this type of content does not always age well. There are several tips and techniques written years ago which are no longer relevant nowadays.

One example that comes to mind is articles about remote working that were written pre-pandemic. Because of COVID-19, most of the pieces of advice written on this topic may not apply to the situation nowadays. You should take articles like this and update them to reflect current events and other factors that have made them obsolete.

To help you get started on updating the existing content on your website, here are the articles that you should look into:

  • Articles that mention dates
  • Articles that contain various screenshots
  • Articles that cover ever-changing topics, such as algorithms and platform rules

Optimise

Sometimes, even articles that contain relevant information underperform on SERPs. This may happen because of outdated SEO.

To make sure that your articles are well-optimised for search, you can work with an SEO company or use an on-page SEO checklist to determine if your articles meet the following criteria:

  • Title tag includes your target keywords
  • H1 is reader-friendly and contains your target keywords
  • Meta-description is detailed and follows the latest standard character count
  • Subtitles contain variations of your keyword
  • URL is short and contains your target keywords
  • Images are optimised for the web
  • Alt texts are relevant

Once you make sure that your article follows the criteria listed above, you can see a boost in its performance in SERPs.

Refresh Your Content Your Way

Remember that the tips listed above are not exclusive of each other. Each refreshing method can be used in tandem, depending on what your existing article needs.

For example, you can expand your content while also optimising it for search. You can also update your existing article while expanding it. Keep in mind that the main goal is to keep your content relevant and top of mind of search engines.

To learn more about content strategy and SEO techniques, feel free to browse through our blog page today.