One simple way you can increase the effectiveness of your website’s SEO and gain more traffic from search engines is to update your website’s old content. If you take the time to go over content that is outdated and give your site a content facelift, this will improve your website’s freshness score.
What Is a Freshness Score?
Google stated one of its goals when it comes to its algorithm is to provide content that is the most useful and relevant to users. One of the metrics that Google uses to judge this is how fresh the content is. It scores pages according to the type of search query they fall under.
Not every type of search needs ultra fresh content. That gets factored in as well. For instance, if users search for the “price of gold,” obviously many of them want to know the current value of gold bullion, so posts or updates on websites talking about what that price is right now will be prioritized.
Content that requires freshness includes:
- Recent events
- Popular topics
- Regularly recurring events
- Product reviews
However, if users search for “best chicken soup recipe,” the creation date of the content is less important than how users engage with it. So the freshness score of that page will be less relevant to the search results. It still factors in, however, so you can’t afford to let old content sit in a corner of your website and gather dust.
How to Freshen up Your Content
There are a number of ways to freshen content so that it will appear higher up in search results. One of those ways is to update the creation date of content you have. If you posted a wonderful bread recipe 5 years ago, it’s likely that it is evergreen content and will never really expire. Changing the date of the post will alter its status in Google’s algorithm and potentially route more traffic to your website, bringing it to the attention of a new group of readers. You can also bump it to the top of your blog or homepage and directly promote it again. If you’ve been steadily creating content over time, it’s likely that your readers may not have seen it before.
If a piece of your content isn’t evergreen, but it still contains useful information, you can edit it to remove any outdated references. Editing blocks of text makes it not only useful to readers again, but it refreshes the status of the content in Google’s algorithm. It’s more likely to appear higher in search results, and Google rewards content that people click on from their search results page because it’s considered a better resource. This creates a virtuous cycle of ever improving rankings.
While you’re editing the text, fix any broken links, spelling or grammar errors, or replace old low resolution images. Give it all a good makeover because you want the new visitors you’ll get to be impressed.
Finally, while you’re sprucing up your old content, take some time to optimize your content for the right keywords. If your old SEO was nonexistent or poorly done, now is your chance to fix that too. You want your search rankings to be as good as they can be, and that includes good SEO as well.
If your website has been around awhile, there is a good chance that you have content that isn’t relevant or useful to you right now but could be with a little editing. It’s simpler and faster to edit old content than it is to create new, and the rewards you could reap might be great. Take a look at your archives and see if there’s anything there you can revamp to improve your site’s freshness score and search rankings.
