How to update outdated content (and why you should!)

It’s a digital marketing mantra that ‘content is king’. It engages your audience, positions you as an expert in your field, establishes brand recognition, builds trust, and brings you customers. It’s also hugely scalable – good content that’s search-friendly will sit proudly on search engines, so potential customers can find you. Outdated content will have an adverse impact on your search engine rankings – Google and other search engines no doubt prefer fresh content. Whether that’s brand new or updated, when Google recognises recently published content, it will crawl your site and boost your traffic. Here’s how you can refresh your outdated content…

Clean up mistakes 🧼 

You may have brilliant copywriters writing your content, but when going back in time, you might find typos and grammar mistakes here and there. Sometimes content gets written quickly and pushed out without properly being proofread and edited. Poorly written content disrupts the user experience, as they stop thinking about the content when they’re distracted by the mistake. It’s a good way to get readers to lose interest and trust. 

The good thing is, it’s easily fixed! Review your poorly performing content (or work with a great copywriter) and improve the language. Trim the fat. Clean up mistakes. Make it more readable.

Broken links 🔗

If your content links to other sites, make sure there are no broken links, which can have an affect on your search rankings. It’s always annoying to click on a link and be greeted by the “whoops, this page can’t be found” page. Avoid this by checking that sites you’ve previously linked to haven’t been changed or taken down. You could take this time to even link to newer resources with more recent information and data, boosting the value of your content. Or, go one step further, and link to content within your own site that didn’t exist when the old piece was originally created.

Choose the right keywords 🔑

If your content isn’t performing well, it could be the keywords you chose to optimise originally. Take on some additional keyword research, re-optimise the page for the right keywords, and boost results!

Old news 🙄 

It’s so important to update outdated information. It prevents readers from getting incorrect information, keeps your content current, and increases brand trust. Even if it’s driving decent traffic, the content needs to be up to date. The traffic might be decent, but what about the CTR and bounce rate? All that potential is lost without incorrect, old information.

Here’s what our Digital Marketing Manager, Jo, says…

“Updating old website content should be part of your ongoing search strategy – not only will it keep your content fresh and relevant for the user, it will give Google a nudge to re-crawl the page and ultimately increase its visibility.

It can be tempting to delete out of date content but this can be a bad move from an SEO perspective. Rework it instead – update keywords based on current search trends, check for broken / old outbound links, amend content based on user intent, and give it a new lease of life!”

Updating your outdated content can lead to better search rankings, more traffic, shares on social media, more leads, more people discovering you, and ultimately, more customers.

Need a content refresh? Get in touch with Forever to find how we can help 📲