Refreshing Existing Content Help SEO

Can Refreshing Existing Content Help SEO?

All content on the web loses its freshness over time—including that on your website. But taking the time to refresh your content can breathe new life into it and boost your search engine ranking. Learn more about the benefits of constantly refreshing your web pages and how to do it.

Why Refreshing Existing Content Help SEO

Content freshness is an important ranking signal for search engines. When you refresh your content, you remind the search engines that you have an active site—and this is good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Another advantage of refreshing your content is that it gives you the opportunity to fix outdated stats, broken links, grammatical errors, and other issues you may notice in your content. Left unaddressed, these issues can negatively impact the user experience your site provides and lower your SEO ranking.

Last but not least, refreshing existing content gives you the opportunity to update keywords. Search trends on the internet change over time. Keywords that were popular two years ago may not be relevant today.

These Page Refresh Strategies Can Boost SEO

When refreshing existing pages on your website, it’s good to keep in mind that some pages will need to be refreshed more often than others. A refresh that updates stats, fixes issues and adds extra content will always be more valuable than one that makes only slight tweaks to an article.

Here are some of the most important content refresh strategies you can use:

Language refresh – Give the text an extra edit and proofread to fix grammar or style issues and improve readability.
Accuracy refresh – Check all stats and statements for relevancy and update them when needed. For older articles or time-sensitive posts, add an extra paragraph or two to the article to explain why the content is still relevant today.
Link refresh – Check that all the links in an article work and fix any broken links you may discover.
Keyword refresh – Research the value of the keywords in your content and update them if necessary.
Media refresh – Add more visual content to older articles that are missing it. Add an image, chart, or graph every 300 words or so.
Technical refresh – Update page titles, URLs, meta descriptions, image filenames, and alt tags.
Social media refresh – After you’re done updating the page, re-share it on social media to draw more attention to it—remember that your social media presence is an SEO ranking factor.

Some strategies are more relevant for some pages than for others. For example, a contact page won’t be needing all that much refresh over time. On the other hand, a long blog post featuring lots of links and stats will need constant refreshing to stay relevant.