In the quest of attempting to find more organic search traffic, it’s common for new content to be continuously created on a regular basis. In fact, an average of 6 million blog pieces are published online every single day in an attempt to boost traffic from SEO.
This exact figure means everyday, globally, time, money and additional resources are being invested to produce new content on a regular and ongoing basis.
Fast forward 12 months later those articles created from scratch have peaked after 6-9 months and have since started to stagnate and decline. Looking at your analytics data, it seems this trend is ongoing and likely to continue. These articles have simply lost their effectiveness.
Webpages focused on driving organic search traffic can lose their effectiveness and ability to generate traffic over time from SEO. This is because:
-
- Search engines like Google want to deliver the newest and most accurate content
-
- Competitors are always looming, creating much better content, providing regular updates to those pieces of content
Increasing your traffic from SEO doesn’t necessarily have to come from new content. In fact, it’s much easier to squeeze your existing and current content for more organic search traffic.
If you’re interested in generating more traffic from SEO focusing on your existing content, then you’ve come to the right place.
What is SEO content?
Firstly, it’s important we understand what SEO content is. This is so we apply our focus in optimising articles that actually have potential to grow through SEO.
SEO content is a common phrase used to describe content that is written for SEO purposes as you’re looking for it to rank across search engines.
Any of the following pages can be classed as SEO content:
-
- Service Pages
-
- Product Pages
-
- Blog Posts
-
- Articles
-
- Educational Pages
-
- How to pages
-
- Informational pages
-
- And so much more…
The purpose of SEO content is to focus on a particular phrase or set of phrases, suitable for driving traffic that is relevant to a consumer’s query, that we can provide an answer or a solution for.
As these pages are designed for organic traffic we base their existence and usefulness on how much traffic they drive in from a search engine.
Why is updating your SEO content important?
When consumers do a search online, they’re looking for accurate results. A solution or answer to their query. Search engines take this as gospel and so appreciate updated and accurate information.
Example experiences: Having worked with charities whereby they focus on providing professional, well researched and in some cases medical content. When they were first created, they thrived and continued to grow month on month and year on year.
However, fast forward 4 years later, most of these hadn’t been updated. The content remained the same. When you reviewed the analytics most of these pages were in decline in terms of SEO traffic. 4 years is a really long time to leave medical information untouched. As new solutions and medical trials are being released regularly.
A search engine like Google may start to think, this content is old.
Newer, updated content being made available can be the reason you have an edge over your competitors.
If you want to drive long term SEO growth then looking at what you already have in content is pivotal. Maintaining and growing your existing content through SEO means consistency, while you continue to build around that with new articles.
How often should SEO content be optimised?
A great question, which doesn’t have a definitive answer!
How often you update your SEO content depends on so many factors. These factors can include:
-
- Industry you operate in
-
- Competition around phrase your after
-
- Competition around the article you’ve written
-
- However often new information is released in your industry
There’s so much more we could list here however hopefully you get the picture. There are generally so many factors that can affect how often you should update content.
As a rule of thumb we recommend optimising existing SEO content at least every 3-6 months. This ensures you give yourself a good enough window to always look back at your existing content before it starts declining.
Ensuring this is completed effectively on a regular basis is important. So it’s recommended you implement a process to help you carry out this task on a monthly basis.
Reporting
It can effectively deliver a view to key SEO pages, showing traffic fluctuations, long-term (year on year) and short term (month on month). This view will enable you to see declining SEO driving pages in seconds without deep analysis.
Project Management
When you identify the SEO specific content that requires optimising, it needs documenting. It needs to be planned into a schedule. So we recommend creating a project management sheet or tool whereby your content writers can get access to understand which pages require updating.
Content Writers
Having them available and onboard with updating content is pivotal. This means you can effectively use a 3-6 month cycle for updating content. Your content writers know exactly where to look for which items to update next and so the process becomes smooth and frictionless.
How to optimise content for SEO?
SEO Tools
Optimising existing articles requires research and data, so you need your SEO tools. These are tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, Serpstat, Moz. These particular SEO tools enable you to see how your current SEO content is performing, identifying which keywords have potential for further growth. Before we update an article we need to understand ‘What we’re updating it for?’ Where are the opportunities to gain further traffic.
Alongside these SEO tools Google Search Console needs to be utilised. This is where you’ll understand your website and webpages relationship with Google. Google Search Console is a fantastic tool for understanding what phrase you’re doing well for and which phrases you’re not. Using Google Search Console you can identify where your content opportunities are. This can come in the form of additional depth of an existing topic or completely writing from scratch and including a new angle you had missed before.
Find your opportunity keywords
Before any optimisation begins you need to have an understanding of why and what you’re updating an article for. So, it’s important you use some of the SEO tools or equivalents mentioned above.
When used effectively, you should be able to collect a list of keywords you can now focus on for the particular SEO content piece you want to update.
Reviewing your SEO content
Once you have your opportunity keywords to focus on, you then need to turn your attention to the SEO content page in question. The idea here is to look for opportunities where you can include these opportunity phrases without hindering your already existing keywords that rank well.
We recommend reviewing the following areas to see if they require updating:
- Metadata
- Headings and subheadings
- The URL
- The existing content itself:
-
-
- Do we have the right depth?
-
- Are all links still live?
-
- Have we included images?
-
- Is it still visually appealing?
-
- Have we used enough keyword variation for our primary keyword?
-
- Are we missing any information we could add to the page?
Effectively running through this process will ensure you have a recurring process to optimise your existing articles for growth. All you need to do now is ensure it’s part of your strategy moving forward.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to find additional SEO traffic growth opportunities then updating your existing content is an easier process to achieve this. In fact, we highly recommend you have a recurring process whereby your SEO strategy enables you to review existing articles at least every 3-6 months. This will allow for consistency in traffic from SEO allowing new articles to focus on adding the general growth factor.
Who are Egnetix Digital?
Egnetix Digital is a Kent based SEO consultancy with over 10+ years experience. We support brands in delivering consistent business growth by ensuring their website is performing effectively through SEO.
We understand the true value in updating existing articles. Through experience and implementation at Egnetix Digital it’s proven method for achieving complete organic search growth.