The advantage of having a blog (and a content strategy) is the ability to “recover” value from old entries. Every professional blogger will tell you this: regularly refreshing your content is the key to better positioning. Updating old articles has become as important as creating new ones. How to do it? How can Marketing Automation help with this?
Why update content?
A. Google likes this.
Content freshness is one of the key aspects influencing a website’s ranking in search results. Valuable content is not only about the content – also about the current availability of information. In 2011, Google introduced “Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)”, an important update that helps users find fresh content in response to a given query.
In practice, QDF involves adapting search results based on the freshness of the content. Google has noticed that many user queries are related to current events, trends or information. Google wants to make money: more people search for current affairs, so more ads will be displayed.
If your website provides up-to-date information or the topics change quickly, understanding how Google QDF works is important. You can get priority in search results…if your content is the newest and closest to users’ current search queries.
B. People like it.
Most users prefer the latest content (partly because it appears at the top of the search). See how popular phrases containing, for example, the current year are – such as “washing machine ranking 2023”. It is common for users to filter search results by date, selecting the most recent ones.
Old content quickly becomes outdated. This is especially visible in the guide content. An example would be marketing. Enter the phrase “Google Analytics”. You won’t be reading about the previous version of Analytics, you’ll just focus on version 4.
Maybe it’s enough to change the publication date and the content will magically become the most up-to-date? Not completely. Google will not be fooled by, for example, changing the title of the entry from 2020 to 2021. Remember, Google’s priority is to provide users with the most up-to-date, latest and relevant information.
When to update content?
Generally, we should update content depending on when the original text was published. Most likely, a blog entry published four years ago will require more urgent renovation than a text written a year ago. Of course, updating the content depends heavily on the industry these texts concern. as we mentioned above, in some industries, for example marketing, technological progress and the invention of new know-how are so fast that texts from last year may be largely out of date.
We should also carefully observe trends in phrases searched on the Internet. For example, the free Google Trends tool will help you with this, as it will show you which terms are currently the most popular. Very often, among these entries, you can find keywords that perfectly match your company’s industry. You can implement such keywords into your content and saturate your texts with the appropriate number of the most popular and most frequently searched phrases. In this way, the text will not lose its original substantive value, but Google’s indexing robots will additionally treat it as content that responds to the current needs of users.
An additional argument for updating existing content is the ease of this process. No matter how you look at it, we already have a ready foundation in the form of the original text. Now Just replace or add a few elements – for example, containing the mentioned current keyword phrases – leaving the core of the original text without any significant changes. Of course, it is not the case that we should add new keywords by force, because in every text the most important thing is its coherence and meaning – adding the most popular phrases without any order and composition usually ends in the text being simply unreadable, so what if we it is better to position and Google robots will search for all current keywords, if the content is unreadable by a human, and after all, it is for people that we create our written word.
At some point, it is worth stopping creating new content and taking care of the older ones. Controversial? Perhaps so, but in all likelihood the content you created in the past has already dropped in search rankings, so it now serves no purpose other than being a decoration in your portfolio. It’s a bit of a waste of resources and time you once devoted to creating these materials. This often comes out during an SEO audit, when you may notice that traffic and conversion rates are constantly decreasing for older content that used to rank high in search results.
What content to update?
In an ideal world – all content should be updated from time to time. A perfect world does not exist. Most organizations have limited human and time resources. Therefore, you need to choose content whose updating will be most effective for your business.
Firstly – the content that is on the second page of search results. Close and yet far away. This position indicates that they are well optimized and appreciated by indexing machines, but they are missing just a few small things that could boost them to the first page in Google.
Analyze the competitive content that is above you in the search results. See what keywords they use and compare your content with them. This way, you will quickly find out what your content is missing and you will be able to supplement it with these points.
But remember, it’s not just about adding content. Sometimes you also need to subtract something, for example things that distract readers and prevent them from quickly and easily reaching the content they are interested in. It is worth installing tools on the website that record user behavior – such as Hotjar – to check which places are potential barriers to proper content exploration.
The next thing to update is the battle of your content. It often happens that you use the same keywords or even entire text fragments to describe, for example, similar products. Content cannibalization is like wrestling with yourself and serves no purpose – because in the end, none of the content wins, and you only waste time and energy.
It is best – especially in the case of blog entries – to remove old, duplicate content and use a 301 redirect to transfer power from old posts to new, updated ones. Why redirection? Because old URLs still have great value, accumulating search engine authority and trust over the years.
Are there topics that do not need to be updated? Yes, mainly for reasons of time and resources, you need to set a list of priorities in advance. Priority for updating content does not have to be given to case studies or success stories of your company – their task is not to work towards positioning, they are simply to present the professional side of the organization that helps its clients – and the content contained there is unlikely to expire.
You also need to be careful with content that has achieved the highest positions in search results – there, thorough changes may do more harm than good. As the classic saying goes, there is no point in fixing what works.
How will Marketing Automation help you update your content?
iPresso Marketing Automation is an advanced tool that can help you update content on your website or other marketing channels. Here are some ways iPresso can be useful in this process:
iPresso allows you to precisely segment your contact database based on various criteria, such as user behavior, preferences or demographics. This allows you to tailor your content to a specific audience, presenting them with the content that is most important to them.
Marketing Automation allows you to create personalized messages and content. You can tailor content to a specific recipient, taking into account their behavior and preferences. This makes the content more attractive and more tailored to the user’s needs.
Thanks to iPresso, you can set automatic notifications about important content updates. For example, if you add a new article to your blog, you can notify subscribers who are interested in that topic.
Monitoring user behavior. iPresso allows you to track user behavior on the website. This allows you to notice which content is the most popular and which needs updating. You can also identify when users stop interacting on the page, which may indicate the need to update content.
You can use iPresso to automatically send emails with content updates to your subscribers. Thanks to this, you can maintain regular contact with them and inform them about new content on the website.
iPresso allows you to conduct A/B tests that help determine which versions of your content are more effective. This means you can experiment with different versions of your content and choose the ones that perform best.
Thanks to iPresso Marketing Automation, managing and updating content becomes more effective and focused on user needs. This tool allows you to deliver more personalized and timely content, which can increase user engagement and improve your website’s performance.
And you can find out about it by testing free trial account.
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