This has been the topic of discussion since websites started realizing the value of quality content, and each year there are new and different ways that you can revamp old content. This does not refer only to blog articles or guides published on your website, but the content on other webpages—the homepage, a category page, a welcome page, etc.—as well. In other words, it’s important to be reminded that SEO can go away despite the fact that it takes so long to see results. SEO best practices change, information becomes outdated, and links become broken, and it’s up to you to make sure every page on your website is keeping up with it all.
Identifying Webpages that Need a SEO Refresh
You can identify webpages that need an SEO refresh by completing a content audit, which you can learn more about here. A content audit is essentially just a process of organizing all of the content you have published and analyzing that content for relevancy, broken links, outdated information, etc. It also helps give you a second look at the content types and subjects that worked well for your audience because of CTR or social sharing. Ultimately, doing an audit will help give you a handle on what you have and where you should go in the future if you want to find content success.
If you click on the link above, you’ll see all of the different options you have for conducting a content audit, including different tools you can use. However you decide to create a list of your content is fine, but make sure that you keep that list for the future. You should complete one content audit every 6 months, and although the first one is going to be very tedious, the rest moving forward should be much quicker.
Tips and Tricks to Bringing SEO Back Into Your Older Pages
As discussed above, how you are going to bring SEO life back to your old webpages will of course depend upon what the pages need—you may need to fix broken links, update a statistics, etc.—but in general there are a few things you can do to take things one step further and really improve your SEO by actually improving the content as a whole:
Write an update for an outdated piece of content.
A lot of Webmasters will look at an old piece of content and just change bits and pieces of it, but it’s not a bad idea to write an entire updated section and publish it at the bottom of the post. If something you’ve written about has changed, putting new and fresh content on the bottom of that page will help improve your SEO and keep readers updated. If you’d prefer to change the content entirely to omit outdated information that works as well, but this actually takes more time in the majority of situations.
Focus on sematic SEO.
Semantic SEO, which you can learn more about here, is going to be huge in 2015, so the sooner you can optimize for this the better. Worrying about which words are surrounding links (which is really more SEO cocitation) as well as altering your content to think about what people may type into a search engine is a great way to make your content more relevant. Google is going to spend more time this year looking at search queries as conversations and questions as opposed to just keywords, so the ambiguity of words is important.
Complete new keyword research.
On the complete opposite note, while semantic SEO is on the rise that does not mean that keyword research is over. When looking to revamp your content, it may make sense to do some fresh keyword research to see if there is more opportunity somewhere that there may not have been when you published the article a year or so ago. Change your tags accordingly and this should help improve your SEO overall.
Create video or other content types.
If a piece of old content isn’t getting any more views or seems stale and outdated, you may want to consider creating a video out of that content. You can then publish the video on the same page as your old content and re-publish to give it a boost. Other content types such as infographics, polls and surveys, interviews, podcasts, etc. could also be a great way to improve your SEO. Google likes to see a variety and they like to see engagement, and in 2015 video is a great way to make it happen.
Add more internal links with your newer content.
When you originally published your content, there is a chance that you had not yet written a piece that would be a good internal link. In other words, if you just recently wrote a great piece that did well with your audience and it is relevant to an old piece of content, make sure you are inter-linking. Not only are internal links great for SEO, but they help keep people on your website longer.
I also recommend checking out this article that explains how to change your content from popular to profitable if you’re looking to make content changes. Do you have any tips on bringing new SEO life to old webpages? Is there anything that did or did not work for you in the past? Let us know in the comment section below.