4. Schedule reviews and refreshes for dated content
It can be tempting to disregard content once it’s on your website and bringing in traffic, especially when it performs well initially.
But what works today might not work in a year’s time, especially if the topics or trends you’re covering in your content develop over time. Posts that once ranked well and generated traffic might have grown dated since you originally hit publish.
When this happens to high-performing pages, it can have a dramatic impact on your online visibility. At this point, you’ll have two options:
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You can aggressively ship new content and target new keywords to try and compensate for these losses
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You can try to increase yield from your original content by updating and refreshing it
The latter requires less time and resources, but it can still be highly effective. In fact, research by HubSpot revealed that updating old blog posts can increase traffic to these by 106%.
A rewrite won’t always be a quick fix, though. First, you need to diagnose what elements of your content might be causing it to underperform and why. It could be that you need to introduce more user-generated content for a high-intent page or an angle that isn’t covered elsewhere in the SERPs.
Consider what the reader would want to know in this climate, what’s already ranking well right now, and how you can deliver unique value.
Not only will this increase the reach of your content, but it will also improve the quality of it, encouraging people to return to your site for similar content in the future. This is critical to sustaining your online presence.
5. Bring external voices and thought leaders into your content
Thought leadership content is often viewed as separate from search-optimized content. Different people own the two types of content, and they rarely collaborate on content production.