How do you audit and update your old content to improve your organic search ranking?

1 Why update old content?

Updating old content can have many advantages for your website and audience. It can increase traffic and conversions by targeting new keywords, trends, and user intents. Furthermore, it can improve your authority and credibility by offering accurate and updated information. Additionally, it can enhance user engagement and retention by providing more value and solving problems. Moreover, updating content can reduce bounce rate and improve dwell time by eliminating outdated or irrelevant content. Moreover, it can prevent content cannibalization and duplication by consolidating or removing similar pages. Finally, it can boost link building and social sharing potential by creating evergreen and shareable content.

2 How to audit old content?

Before you update your old content, it is important to audit it to identify which pages are performing well and which ones need attention. You can use Google Analytics to measure traffic, conversions, bounce rate, dwell time, and other user behavior indicators. Google Search Console can analyze impressions, clicks, rankings, and keywords for each page. SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush can evaluate backlinks, domain authority, content quality, and competitors. Content audit tools such as Screaming Frog, ContentKing, or HubSpot can crawl your website and find errors, issues, or gaps in your content. Once you have the audit results you can categorize your old content into four groups: keep (performing well and no major changes needed), update (some potential but need improvements or modifications), consolidate (similar or overlapping pages that can be merged into one comprehensive page), and delete (outdated, irrelevant, or low-quality pages that should be removed or redirected).

5 How to maintain your old content?

Updating old content is not a one-time task. To ensure that your content remains relevant, engaging, and optimized, you need to maintain it on a regular basis. You can use a content calendar or a content management system to plan and manage your content updates. Some of the best practices for maintaining your old content include reviewing it at least once a year or more frequently depending on the topic and industry, using data and feedback to identify which content needs updating or revising, following the same steps and tips used for updating old content, promoting and distributing the updated content through email, social media, or other channels, and testing and experimenting with different formats, headlines, keywords, or content types to see what works best for your audience and goals.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?