Content takes time and effort to build up. If you’ve developed a considerable amount of content but do not feel it is generating the kind of results you are expecting, it may be time to work back through that content for optimization tactics you are missing out on.
WHAT IS “CURRENT CONTENT”?
Current content can be defined as the content that is currently found on your website. These are words you have already considered, developed, and implemented. These can be in the form of blogs or “core pages” of your website. These pages and posts that have been sitting on your website for months or even years are serving little to no purpose for your website at this point in time. Auditing and understanding the content you could refresh can help keep you from wasting your time and focused on the pages that will have the most impact for your effort.
FRESHNESS SCORE
Our good SEO friends at Moz have put together a great blog talking about how fresh content may influence Google rankings. Google understands different queries have different needs when it comes to the search results users are looking to find. Examples of queries needing fresh content would be something like “Best cameras” or “NBA Scores”. You wouldn’t want to see the best cameras from 2007 in 2020 and you wouldn’t want to see NBA scores from the previous season if you are halfway through the current season. The Google algorithm has improved these tactics over time and uses signals like search volume spikes, news coverage, and social media info.
CONTENT TO OPTIMIZE
As with the implementation of an SEO strategy, you should prioritize your important pages over supporting content. We would want to be sure to freshen up the content on our “Denver SEO” page before we moved on to optimize our “Five Ways To Find Topics For Your Blog” piece of content. The benefits you will realize from increased ranking on your core pages should far outweigh the results you would get from optimizing your supporting content.
While your core pages should be your immediate priority, as long as you have focused your service offerings down to specifics, you should be able to move through this pretty quickly. Now it is time to prioritize the supporting content you have on your site. Great pieces to update or freshen up are lists, top (year) posts, and updates to specific topics you’ve written about in the past. Take the penguin update Google released a few years back for example. We wrote about the update when it launched, and it has changed since. This gives you an excellent opportunity to build out and add to those pieces with updated information.
Updating your content can be highly beneficial to your SEO efforts. As long as you spend the time to create a game plan and prioritize the pages or pieces of content that will yield the best results, this process should come naturally. Should you run into any trouble or look for clarification, contact us today!
