Any company or organization that made a website to market its business should be concerned in increasing its rankings on search engines, especially on Google, the biggest of them all.
Content is king, and producing helpful and relevant content is sure to help your cause, but that can take a lot of time and effort. An alternative strategy that can similarly boost your rankings is to make updates on your old content.
Updating your old articles takes less time and work to finish because you’re already working on proven useful content.
Since it’s easier to finish, that means it delivers results faster as well. The million-dollar question is, how exactly do you update your old content to rank better on search engine results?
Table of Contents
1. Improve Your Click-Through Rate
One of the first things you should aim for when updating your old content is to improve your click-through rate.
If you try to search for any term on Google, you might notice that the highest-ranking results are usually entries published within the last year. This is because, for a lot of topics, including search engine optimization (SEO), times change as quickly as information gets updated.
Any information that might have been accurate a month or two ago might not be the best answer for users right now.
People like new things and the same goes for ideas. If an online user searches for help in a particular topic and articles from different years pop up on the results, it’s almost certain that he (or she) will click on articles that were published recently over those that came out three years ago.
This click-through rate is important because, in Google’s search results algorithm, your website is more likely to rank higher if more online users click on your content from the search engine results page. Updating your content means you’re re-publishing it at a more recent date, which makes it more appealing to online users and consequently to Google.
Of course, it’s not just the publishing date that draws people in to click on your content. You also want to write a compelling headline and meta description to grabs your reader’s attention and make sure they click through.
2. Make Your Content More Current
When you update your content, one of your priorities should be to make it more usable and helpful for your website visitors.
Remember: the accuracy of information changes as time goes by, so you want to make sure the information you provide is always up-to-date so that online users can benefit from it and, if satisfied, recommend it to other web users who can add to your click-through rates and website visits.
To update your content’s accuracy, always try to find new information related to your original piece. No matter how specific your topic might be, there will always be new information that you can use after a couple of months.
Once you’ve found your new information, make sure to mention that you’ve included that new content in an update. By creating a more valuable and updated resource for online users, you’re setting your website properly for better search engine result rankings.
3. Remove Broken Links (And Add New and Better Ones)
It’s frustrating to update your old content only to find that the links you’ve featured before are broken or not working anymore. Often, this means that the website containing the resources you linked to before has stopped working, or it has been bought by another business that cleaned out the URL.
Either way, these broken links can hurt your search rankings and might push you further down on Google’s search engine results page.
An easy solution is to remove the links altogether and replace them with new links to better, more updated resources. Go for resources that weren’t available when you first created your original content.
By adding new resources and new links, you’re creating a lot of new value for your website, which would make the content look much more valuable to search engines like Google.
Outbound links are essential in ranking search engine results, so you can optimize your links to make your website a more valuable resource by linking to the best content on the internet.
However, you shouldn’t forget to link to your own resources as well through inbound links.
By adding more useful, in-depth content and updating your resources to more recent information, you can drive your rankings higher without spending hours on writing new content.
4. Add Multimedia For Better User Engagement
You can also improve your search engine rankings by adding multimedia content.
People like seeing diverse content on a website, and adding different types of images, videos, and sound effects can significantly improve user experience on your website, which can directly translate into more clicks and web visits.
When adding multimedia to your content, make sure that you always link back to the original content. This will make it easier for online users to identify where the media came from, and it also helps you update the content easier by allowing you to find it more efficiently later on.
Remember that you don’t need to create multimedia content yourself. Ideally, it’s better if you do, but if you find it too challenging you can always find free content online that you can use to grab your audience’s attention.
Just make sure to always cite references if necessary, and your website should strongly benefit from adding new types of media by making your content more engaging and enjoyable for your readers.
A Final Word on Updating Your Old Articles For Better Ranking
If you want to rank better on search engine results, you can simply update your old content to give it new life and drive traffic to your website. It’s a shame if you’d let your old articles go to waste, especially given how hard you worked on creating them the first time. Instead of letting old content rot away, freshen it up by updating the information to better help online users.
Add more compelling content to your website to keep it up to date, and expand your reach by adding different types of media that your audience can relate to.
Updating your old articles is an efficient and effective way to increase the traffic that your online site receives from search engines, and it’s also a sound strategy to create a significant improvement in your content’s ranking.
Once you’ve updated your content, you must promote it in the same way you did earlier to inform your readers, old and current, of its new value.
Make sure that you’ve removed any broken links and added new ones that link to better, more updated resources for your audience to enjoy.
As long as you properly update your old content, you’ll be able to create a remarkable improvement in search engine result rankings without wasting too much time or effort.
