Refreshing Old Posts Often Beats Writing New Ones
Publishing is exciting and updating is not, so most content calendars are all new material. That is backwards for any site with a couple of years of archive, because pages that already have some authority respond far faster to work than pages that have none.
Find the candidates
In Search Console, look for pages with impressions but few clicks, or with an average position between 8 and 20. Those are pages search engines are willing to show and users are not choosing, or pages sitting just below the results that get traffic. Both respond to a couple of hours of work.
What to change
- Fix the title and meta description first and measure for two weeks before doing anything else. On a page ranking well with a poor click-through rate, this alone can double traffic.
- Answer the query in the first paragraph. Look at the top queries for that page and make sure the answer appears immediately, not after a history lesson.
- Add what is missing. Compare against the pages currently outranking you and note which subtopics they cover that you do not. Add those sections; do not pad.
- Update the facts. Prices, versions, screenshots, recommendations, and anything with a year in it.
- Add internal links to the relevant service page and from two newer posts back into this one.
What not to do
Do not change the URL. Do not delete and republish to get a new date; you lose the page's history. Do not rewrite from scratch a page that is ranking, because you will remove the part that was working without knowing which part it was.
The dates question
Update the visible "last updated" date only when you have made a substantive change. Refreshing dates on untouched pages is a trick, readers notice, and it erodes the trust that makes people believe your dates at all.
A workable split
Alternate: three new posts, then one refresh week where you improve four existing pages. Most sites we work with see more traffic movement from the refresh week than from the three new posts, at a fraction of the effort.
