If you have a website or if you are into content then you understand the value of content and you also understand that there is a problem with content.
We are talking about the shelf life of content because every online content has a time of relevance and after that time is over, that content simply becomes useless because it fails to generate any results.
It fails to help the site with its SEO, outdated content is something people do not visit and that is why your traffic count simply vanishes.
But now you have a mountain load of content of maybe thousands and thousands of words and you simply do not know what to do with it rather than just let it sit.
It isn’t doing anything significant and you simply do not want to scrap that content or let it sit idle.
This blog will help you understand how you can recycle that content and do a content refresh and that is how you can not only recycle but upcycle old content and improve its effectiveness and put it to new use.
However, we must start this blog by understanding what is exactly a content refresh so grab yourselves a coffee and let’s get into this very interesting topic.
This Is What We Mean by Content Refresh
If your website is a few years old then you probably have old content that is simply not generating any results and this might be something in your attention or you might not have thought about this until now.
That means a lot of high-quality content is simply sitting there because it has lost its relevance because of time and because those topics are not trending anymore.
That means you have this huge potential of content just sitting there and doing nothing and not working for your website to bring in more traffic or improve SEO.
If you feel like you utilising that old content and giving it a revamp so that it becomes effective once again then that is exactly what content refresh means.
A better name for this activity can simply be content recycling because that is exactly what you are doing.
When Do You Need a Content Refresh?
Information Out of Date
One of the most important instances when you need a content refresh desperately is simply because your content is either dated to a particular year or has older information.
This means, for example, if you have written a blog on “Blogging Trends In 2019“ then that is definitely not going to work today.
This is when you might need the content refresh.
Bad Performance and Poor Traffic
One of the best indications of knowing when you need a content refresh is simply when that content stops generating any traffic or leads. This is why it is always important to keep checking your analytics.
This is the simplest indication that you need a content refresh. Older existing content can have a visible decline in traffic that’s easy to spot.
You can find out if that is it is low by comparing it to more recent content.
Bad SEO Situation
The third instance when you can find out you definitely need a content refresh is when your SEO is not working.
This means your search engine rankings are struggling desperately and it is happening in spite of a lot of content that previously produced great results.
This Is Why a Content Refresh Is a Good Idea
It Is Economically Logical
One of the most common reasons why people refresh existing content is just that creating new content is much more time-consuming as well as taxing on the budget compared to content refresh.
This means it makes much more sense to recycle older content and make it relevant again because it will cost a fraction of the amount compared to creating new content.
The other important factor is simply that if you refresh content then you are also refreshing your older content investment rather than just throwing it away.
However, your content writing and content marketing strategy should not just include refreshing content because that alone will never work. You need to keep generating newer content as well.
New Audience Targeting
When you feel like refreshing content, you can very well expect that content to bring in new traffic.
This means you can effectively utilise older content and harvest the benefits of it as if it were newly created content and that is the most important reason why people recycle content.
You can simply do this by utilising newer keywords that are doing better than the older ones and these new effective keywords will rejuvenate that older content.
Content refresh is the best way to ensure new lead generation.
User Experience
If you work with content then you already understand the importance of the E-E-A-T guidelines by Google.
These are important guidelines set by Google and you can Google them and find out what they mean but the key thing to note is that Google rewards user experience and user-friendliness of content.
That means if you can add new information to older content in order to refresh it then you are also refreshing the user experience and making sure that content is more useful to users. This will have a positive effect on your SEO.
Search Results Relevance
Let us understand this with an example. If you have content that talks about something that was relevant in 2020 and it is still relevant today then you might think Google will display it in the search results.
However, since it is older content, Google or any other search engine will prioritise newer content even if your older existing content is still relevant.
This is one of the many metrics that determine the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
However, if you update the dates and make a lot of changes to that existing content and make it relevant to the present then you can expect improvement in search engine rankings once again.
If you are able to refresh older content then that will ultimately help you achieve topical authority with the help of newer content combined.
Types Of Content You Should Refresh
Blogs
The thing about blogs is that they are not only the easiest kind of content to refresh but they are also going to bring you the most significant results once you refresh existing content.
This is because blogs play an important role in any kind of content strategy. That is why if you want to rejuvenate your content strategy and make sure it is performing just as before or even better then the first thing you should touch is going to be blogs.
Product Page
It is not just enough to refresh your blog pages because if you are an eCommerce website then product pages are even more important than the landing page or the blogs page.
And there is a lot that can be updated and refreshed when it comes to product pages from the description to the keywords and much more.
This is because your customer’s preferences change from time to time and you need to adapt to that and update descriptions so that the products become relevant even today.
The other important reason is that if you have an updated product page then it will perform better in search results as well.
Landing Page
We can’t simply forget or ignore the first thing people see when they enter your website and that is going to be the landing page.
If you have an outdated landing page then that will not only affect customer experience but it will affect SERP rankings.
That means if you want to have the best kind of effect then you need to make sure the landing page not only has the latest design changes but also content changes.
This Is How You Can Refresh Content
Analyse The Existing Content
This might seem obvious but the only way you are going to find out if you can refresh old content is by simply doing a content audit.
You need to analyse the performance of new content and compare it with the performance of older content and check if there is a huge difference between the performance.
You should dig up every analytical data you can get your hands on and that will show you if there is a difference and that will help you determine if you actually need a content refresh.
However, when you do the comparison, the time difference between the newer and older content should be at least one year or more.
Do An Information Update
The next point is also very obvious and should come to you naturally and this is something that you might have probably even thought about if we say content refresh.
We are of course talking about doing an information change. This means that when you refresh an older content, you should replace everything that has references to the original date of the existing content.
For example, if you have written a blog during the football World Cup 2022 with references to it because it was trending, you must remove that 2022 reference when you are refreshing that blog.
That means you should remove every identification of the older date and replace it with newer elements.
This includes the dates and events and along with that, it is also a good idea to add things like ‘ updated’, ‘ with new information’ etc in the title of the refreshed content.
Focus On SEO
We wish this was all you had to do but there is something even more important than information update. We are of course talking about SEO.
In order to improve the SEO of the refreshed content, you need to add new keywords for a successful content refresh. You can even replace the older keywords with new keywords for the best effect.
Additionally, you must also make sure the hyperlinks are from new sources and along with that you should do the same for every external link.
You simply have to think of it from the perspective of the search engine because if a search engine finds out that content has new information along with new external links and internal links then it will treat it as new content.
Most importantly, you must always pay attention to E-E-A-T guidelines. Guidelines change and Google’s requirements change, you need to keep that in mind.
Just Text Is Not Good Enough
Gone at the days when just having text was good enough because if you want to refresh your content in a way that produces results then you need to add additional elements that accompany the text.
The simplest way to understand this is that you have to refresh your content in such a way that makes it more user-friendly.
That means if you have content about some kind of instruction and if you add images and videos with it then that content is going to perform way better than something with just text.
You can apply this logic and also utilise other things like different graphs and infographics but then again you must make sure that the page is also optimised for performance.
This is because these elements can slow down the website which might again be bad for user experience.
Additional Content Strategy Tips to Help You Out
Transform Older Content
The thing about refreshing existing content is that people simply choose to update the content with new information and new keywords. That is effective but there is something even better.
Instead of just updating the content for the present times, you can add additional information to the content and expand the content with new sections.
This will improve the chances for that content to be treated as new content. You can think of it like a continuous online journal that keeps on updating with time.
Treat Refreshed Content as New
When we say you need to refresh your older content, we don’t just mean updating that with new information but you must do everything possible to rejuvenate that content.
One of the things you can do is to simply treat it like new content which means promoting it on social media and promoting it through every channel you can find.
If you begin to treat refreshed content as new content then it will be easier for the search engine to think of it as new content and along with that it will bring in new leads.
Edit, Mix and Merge Content
There are no strict rules to what you can do to refresh your content because you can do everything you want.
This means, for example, you can select a few similar blogs and combine these blogs together into a bigger blog that has the capability for topical authority.
You can take away sections from a particular older content and then add those sections to other older content just as a mechanic finds spare parts from different machines.
You can completely scrap a piece of content and use its sections like doner parts on other similar content.
You can mix, match, merge and do anything you want and keep on trying until you find the best recipe for performance.
Reuse and Repurpose Content
If you remember the section about the types of content you can refresh then you might remember that there are different kinds of content such as blogs, product pages, landing pages and much more.
When it comes to repurposing content, you can do anything you want which means you can utilise content from a bad-performing blog and then use parts of that content in a product page because it might perform better in the product page.
You can, for example, repurpose an older blog because it is written very well and use parts of that content in a landing page and vice versa.
And If the Refreshed Content Doesn’t Bring Results
Refreshing content is just about experimentation because there is no secret formula that works 100% of the time and this means you need an optimistic approach towards it and trust trial and error to make it work.
If the content does not seem to work that means you need to change things like the keyword usage and you need to improve the quality of the information and keep removing further references to the original date of the existing content.
You should never stop experimentation because it can help you recover an old investment.
We hope this blog has helped you to understand that no content is useless and that you can refresh all your older content into something that actually helps your website and business.
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Common Content Refresh FAQs
How do I refresh the content of a website?
You need to adopt a step-by-step approach because the first thing to do is to identify which content should be refreshed.
First, you need to choose a couple of older content that might have the potential for the present times. You can then compare the performance between that older content and your regular content.
If you find there is a difference then you should improve that content.
When it comes to refreshing the content, all you have to do is to update the content with new information and new keywords.
You need to remove references to the original date of the existing content and add new references. You can also add new sections to that existing content and it will improve the effect.
We would suggest you to go through this blog to know more.
What does it mean to refresh content?
The concept of refreshing content is quite simple. The basis behind this is that every kind of content has a shelf life.
This means content can lose its effectiveness and it can lose its relevance after a certain period of time. For example, the content that you wrote two years ago might not perform the same way today and might not even bring any new leads.
That is why when we talk about refreshing content, it is about updating that content by adding new information and removing old references from that content to make it updated and rejuvenated.
If you do it correctly then this refreshed content will start performing like new content and will bring in new traffic and will also rank better in search engines.
You can refresh the content multiple ways because you can mix and merge a few parts from older content and create a whole new content out of it with new information.
You can add new sections to existing content and update the information in the existing content or you can even repurpose content by changing its type.
How often should you refresh content?
Technically, there is no limitation behind this because you can do content refresh as often as you want but there might be some hidden limitations to this.
These changes can be in the form of repeated changes in the date or month of a single content and can be flagged by Google’s algorithm if it understands the motive behind this.
That is why we would suggest you to only touch content that is at least one year old so that you can refresh that content and fill it up with enough new information from the past year.
This is an ongoing process and it should never stop because you should keep on writing new content and you should also keep on refreshing older content.
