Content Refresh or Brand New Blog Post?
You spend a lot of time and money outlining, creating, optimizing and distributing blog posts.
But what happens after you hit “publish”?
The content slowly becomes outdated and starts decaying. When visitors come across these old posts, it takes a massive hit on their browsing and brand experience, ultimately affecting conversions and engagement.
So, how can you ensure your existing content isn’t just lying around after it goes live on the website?
Content refreshing—the process of going back to your old content and optimizing it with newer content, an approach better suited to today, and some SEO best practices to help you rank better and improve the user experience.
Without a proper content refreshing strategy, you’re leaving money on the table.
In this article, we’ll look at some actionable reasons why you should prioritize content refreshes over new blog posts and how you can begin doing it right away.
Why and when you should prioritize a content refresh over a blog post
In Q1 2021, over 5 million blog posts were published on WordPress every day. So, although creating new blog posts might be on the top of your list, a content refreshing strategy can help you increase your number of high-performing articles without the time and effort a new blog post requires.
Besides, it’s better to optimize your existing content and push it up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) than add to the massive pile of online content and compete with too many websites.
Let’s look at some other reasons why a content refresh is sometimes better than creating a new blog post:
1. Discover hidden opportunities and rank better
In an ideal world, every blog post you write would rank in the first position on Google forever, getting you the coveted traffic you deserve. But that’s not how it works. The older your content gets, the more irrelevant it’s perceived by the search engine. And since Google wants to show users only the most relevant and valuable content for their search queries—your older posts are likely to tank.
Here, refreshing your older content is a great way to show Google your content is updated, fresh, and still worthy of showing to users. Besides, it’ll also allow you to keep up with the algorithm’s changing nature and optimize your blog posts with the latest updates to pass a green signal to Google, so it pushes you to the top of the page.
ActiveCampaign, an email marketing software, refreshes their well-performing content every year. Last year, they optimized 68 articles, and it was worth every minute because of the glowing results they saw.
“We saw a +245% increase in traffic from the previous year and a +29% increase from the previous quarter. We did this by analyzing our best performing pieces with an AI/ML tool for content gaps, added People Also Ask (PAA) questions, optimized CTAs to align with intent and added internal links.”
-Brendan Hufford, Founder at Growth Sprints
Besides the fact that a content refresh helps you identify new opportunities for ranking and driving more traffic to your website, the content audit also allows you to flag any negative elements spoiling your user experience. Tracy Wallace, the content strategist at Klaviyo, agrees.
And so, it allows you to improve your ROI and get more out of a single piece of old content.
2. Ensure content remains relevant and evergreen
You create an evergreen piece of content, thinking it’ll keep driving traffic to your website and rank higher. But a few weeks in, the ranking drops down. I spoke to Michael Keenan, an experienced SaaS marketer and writer. He believes this happens because of two reasons:
Google believes the blog post is outdated: Maybe you're linking out to 404'd URLs, your tool roundup doesn't include a newer, popular tool, or you’re missing key talking points and updated statistics and research in your article. These things tell Google your post is not as useful as it once was, and so the ranking trickles down.
Search intent changed: Google is always looking to serve the best answers for a search phrase. However, sometimes what users are looking for in a keyword changes. Maybe searchers aren't looking for the "best" options anymore, they want the "cheapest" or the "easiest to start." When this happens, your original content no longer satisfies search intent, and your rankings drop again.
Content refreshing acts as an escape here. It helps you identify “why” your once high-performing blog posts aren’t doing well now and what you can do to get them up again. It also helps keep evergreen articles fresh, provides a better reading experience and maintains higher search rankings.
3. Maintain consistency in content production while saving time
SEO is a long-term game, and it requires consistency to see results. But let’s face it—creating a long-form, highly valuable blog post takes a lot of time. You need to research, outline, write, edit, proofread, and distribute it to get good results, and doing this at a steady cadence isn’t a piece of cake.
However, mixing your content creation strategy with content refreshing can help take the load off, save time and get better results with less effort and time investment.
“We refreshed some content recently, and it correlated with a 40% increase in traffic, 10x increase in leads, and a 3x increase in net new revenue (6+ figures). So, content refreshing is definitely worth doing, especially if you can make some big swings for a small number of pages and have a high ACV.”
- Skyler Reeves, CEO Ardent Growth
Besides, your team can never have all-time creativity to research and write comprehensive and valuable blog posts. Mixing content refreshes in the strategy can prevent creative block, help writers break out of the monotony, and give you enough flexibility to continue your usual publishing schedule—with the chances of seeing better results.
4. Get better customer engagement and satisfaction
Let’s say you turn to an industry leader’s blog every time you have a relative doubt. You search for a specific keyword and find a blog post for the problem you want to solve. But as soon as you open it, it’s dated 2016, has stale statistics, and covers old information which isn’t relevant today.
Wouldn’t you feel disappointed? That’s exactly what content decay does. It sucks the air out of your rankings, yes—but it also stains your customer experience.
So, content refreshes are healthy not just for SEO but for the overall health of your business. The fresh content engages the reader, keeps them hooked to your blog post, increases the amount of time they spend on your website, and provides a better opportunity for conversion or any other action you want them to take.
3 best practices to conduct effective content refreshes
Hubspot regularly conducts content refreshing and has seen an increase in organic traffic by almost 106% and double the number of leads from old content.
However, you don’t see such results by simply changing the images and updating the year in your article—you need to rethink, research, and optimize the article to add some freshness to it.
Here are three best practices to conduct content refreshes:
1. Conduct a thorough content audit
It’s not possible to go back to your oldest blog post and work your way up from there manually to check which blog posts could use some refreshing. Here, a thorough content audit can help you identify the articles likely to have the most significant impact when you update them.
Here’s how you can conduct a content audit:
Create an eligibility checklist of what kind of content should qualify for content refreshing—based on traffic, keywords, backlinks, social shares, or clicks. Choose these KPIs based on your content marketing and SEO goals.
Use Google Analytics or an SEO tool like SEMrush to check your qualifying metrics for each blog post. Organize these numbers on a separate Google Sheet to compare your data later.
Categorize and prioritize your content by flagging the blog posts that are either highly relevant to your audience but have dropped down on numbers or those that are greatly written but didn’t see good results from the beginning. This will help you focus only on pieces worth saving and optimizing.
This content audit will give you a bird view of which pieces you should prioritize so you can schedule them in your editorial calendar and begin optimizing.
2. Identify and address keyword opportunities and content gaps
Most marketers go from conducting the content audit to directly optimizing the blog post. However, it’s crucial to conduct a content gap analysis to see how you can make your article more informational and valuable to the reader and for Google.
Without this, you’ll be shooting darts in the dark. This analysis will help you take out the guesswork and form a content optimization strategy that truly gets results.
Here’s what you should consider:
Can you retarget or merge this piece with another existing blog post?
Is there anything you can expand on or add more context?
Can you add more statistics, real-life examples, and expert quotes to validate your information and make the article more credible?
Can you add more visual breaks?
How can you improve the article's formatting to improve readability?
Is there any unnecessary content that you can remove to make the article crisper?
How can you make the customer click on the CTA better?
VEED, an online video editor used content gap analysis for their refreshing strategy. They analyzed what historically did well for their other channels like YouTube, why their paid users were coming to them, and if there were any overlaps in topics between the two.
Using this, they optimized an article hovering between #35 to #38 in ranking. The blog post had the potential to capture more traffic and did well for competitors because it was in their top 10 drivers of blog traffic—and rightly so, because the results were amazing!
“Three months after the refresh, the article went from #38 to #5 in rankings, and traffic increased by 6,357% for this article going from 45 to 2,906 new monthly visitors and still growing. It’s now in our top 5 articles in terms of driving traffic to the blog.”
-Diana Briceño, Head of Content, Veed
3. Don’t forget to promote your freshly optimized content
Your work doesn’t end once you optimize and refresh your blog post. You need to promote it just as heavily as you would a new blog post to position it in front of your readers, drive traffic, and give your oldie a pick-me-up.
Here’s how you can promote it best:
Pin it on the top of your blog page
Feature it in your newsletter as an update post
Link it internally
Repurpose and share it on your high-traffic social media accounts
Make content refreshing a habit
Refreshing your content is not a one-time tactic. You need to build it into your content marketing strategy and perform it consistently to ensure you’re giving your older pieces a facelift to enhance your metrics and improve the user experience on the website.
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to practice content refreshing, start by identifying how many new blog posts and content refreshes can help you reach your marketing goals. This will help you optimize your time for better results in a short period and keep you as relevant as ever.
Happy refreshing!
Want us to create and execute a data-driven content refreshing strategy for your website? Get in touch today.
By Komal Ahuja
Komal is a freelance writer specializing in creating blog posts around marketing, sales and eCommerce for B2B SaaS companies. When she's not freelancing, she helps freelancers navigate the business side of things with targeted content and masterclasses.
