It’s been a while that I did not update my blog for so long, works have been becoming intense lately and I have been taking classes aside but I am glad that I back! This week, we are gonna spend some time to talk about this interesting topic – how to revamp your old content for getting a better ranking on Google
What Does Content Revamp Means?
For SEO professionals, we tend to use the term “on-page optimization” a lot, the same thing applies to content as well. By the meaning of content, I meant everything that was located within the web site, which includes pages, blogs, videos/audios, FAQs, footer pages, policies pages or even sales pages…etc, we refer to these pages as “content”, so the content revamps basically means to either adding or removing or even readjusting stuffs within the page. The core idea here is to make the piece of content even more useful than before, pretty much close to the concept of updating patches for your games, app or anything else! You just simply want a better experience with speed loading, bug fixes and even add-on materials, and same thing applies to webpages as well.
Why is Content Optimization Important?
Image a scenario where your fridge is full of old food, rotten milk, and leftovers. Every time you open it and search the food that you wanna take, you feel frustrated and uneasy to access the food that you actually want. The bad smell just ruined your appetite, and sometimes it’s just too much stuff and you can’t even locate it. Furthermore, the rotten food inside the fridge will infect the other fresh food as well, so and what will do you? Of course, you will have to get rid of it the bad ones, have a deep cleaning and reorganize everything so you will be able to have a clean, non-toxic food again. Maybe this was just an extreme example but this is why we need to do a content revamp- to improve the freshness of the content to benefit the people who are pulling information from the SERP, so does the Google algorithm.
But why we need your content to be fresh? Here are why:
- Google’s algorithm will detect your page every time when you are updating the page. Depending on the crawl budget, the more info you updated, the one you are sending signals to Google that you are really working hard to maintain your website. In addition, your sitemap should also include the timestamp for sending signals to Google when you update the page
- Content recency & freshness are very important for the search algorithm. Hence, if you are compiling a health insurance page about “Obamacare” in 2017, the situation might be very different when we are looking at 2020 now due to policies, situational changes, so we will need to update these to not confuse other people who are reading it!
- Last but not the least, sometimes when the blog is already indexed by Google but still coming with a lower position ( >2-3 pages), it is possible for us to dig in similar terms and queries which correlated to your topics in order to enhance or strengthen your content, the higher that relevancy and uniqueness is, the better chance that you will be able to rank better!
How to Choose Which Are the Content That I Should Revamp?
This is always an uneasy question for SEO professionals, however, you can always ask yourself the following questions:
- Is your content earned traffics in the past?
- Is your content helped for gaining subscribers?
- Is your content generated more revenue?
- Is your content improved conversion rate better?
- Is your content improved user engagement signals ( bounce rate, click rate, time duration as well as event..etc)
If the above answers are negative, then you might have to revamp the content. Usually, for eCommerce, Insurance, medical & fashion, finance and news industries, you will often need frequent updates to your content in order to remain competitive.
One of the quick ways to determine will be using both Google Analytic or GSC’s data by extracting raw data into a spreadsheet with sessions, revenue, average position, click & impression listed in a different column, and we can cross-reference it with a simple sorting, vlookup and filter functions, you will be able to identify which pages are working for you or not. Once you locate your pages, then try the following formula:
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For Transactional Content
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- For pages that generated high traffics but do not help with conversions, then this indicated that this page is lacking CTA ( Call of actions) buttons or product guidnace
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For Informational Content
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- For pages such as queries related pages such as blog, FAQ, content pages, it is always recommended to research more in-depth keywords from competitors, search terms from SERP and anything useful queries that match your current topic, the goal is to apply the EAT rules from Google to the content. ( Experty, Trustworthy and Authoritative)
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For Obsolete Content
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- Depend on the data, if you spot that there are useless neither bring traffics nor matching your business goals, then chances are it won’t be able to rank on SERP. We should better get rid of it, this was referring to the “rotten milk” example that I was previously given. The type of content does not really serve a purpose to provide useful content to readers; moreover, it is toxic for the website because once the website has a larger amount of this type of pages, the toxic score will impact the domain authority because it is simply sending bad signals to Google
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Beware of Low-Quality Content
Dealing with low-quality content is another difficult task for SEO professionals, lots of people purchase cheap articles such as 0.50 cent from places like China & India and had complained why they never get ranked and sometimes even got penalized by Google, reasons as follows:
- Since most of the freelancing does not have expert knowledge on the subjects that they are written, it is difficult for them to compile high-quality content
- Every piece of high-quality content require deep research about the subjects, keywords, competition difficulty and current situation
- Lots of freelancers produce duplicate content, which will severely impact your content quality, the more this type of content you had on-site, the harmful it will get!
- When you accumulate a certain volume of low-quality content, then Google Bot will reduce the crawling budget on you. For SEO, quality is always > quantity
Again, I am not saying freelancer won’t work, and in fact, I have cooperated with great freelancers who are able to compile excellent content, I just meant that having badly written content will impact your site negatively, even you have lots of URLs.
How to Rebuild Your Content Strategy Better?
The following are the summary that I think will work to improve your content strategy better
- Set your goals
- Identify your primary audience and their pain points
- Determine your brand’s unique expertise
- Develop a list of potential content topics based on your content tilt
- Conduct keyword research
- Determine how to measure success
Having an overview strategy of what you will be writing about is essential to your success. The strategies usually involve deep researches about the competition, industry situation, keywords and situational factors. Using SERP rank position, traffic volume will always be of the keys whenever you are trying to measure your KPIs. If you are planning to rank up a page on 1st page but the 1st page is already filled with competitors that are 10X larger than you, then the chances for ranking up will be very small, you definitely don’t want such a thing to happen, so make sure to select your focus keywords with conditions that you are ONLY capable to.
Dreaming big is always good, however, without realistic plans, you might not be able to see your results. I hope this blog will be helpful!