Old content:  All the once loved blogs and articles sitting in the corner of your website, not generating any traffic and just making your website unnecessarily heavy.

This is how you look at your old content; You think it’s outdated and simply useless for SEO and website ranking.

All your energy is focused on pumping out new content because new content is the key to more views and website traffic. Right?

You might not visit your old content frequently, but search engine crawlers and website visitors do.

Old content on your website represents who you are as a brand. If you have been running your website for 5-10 plus years, the chances are that more than 80% of your website’s content is outdated.

If more than 80% of your website’s content is outdated, the search engine crawlers and your website visitors won’t like the fact and will affect your website’s ranking adversely.

There is no doubt that adding new content to your website is crucial, but it doesn’t mean that you should ignore all your old content.

These are the articles and blogs that once generated a lot of views and website traffic. If you give these a little bit of your time and attention, you will be able to reverse their age.

Renewing old content is considerably easier than writing and uploading new content to your website. 

Results you will generate from updating or renewing your old content might be better than your expectations.

Writing quality content takes a lot of time and energy; all that hard work you once did for your old content should not go to waste.

This might be the right time for you to start updating your old content and slow down a little on pumping out new content.

In this article, you will learn how to identify your old content that still has the potential to generate views and what steps you should take to renew it.

Let’s start with a couple of things your renewed old content can help with

Generating Backlinks

Many of your competitors won’t focus on renewing their old content. Therefore, it provides a huge opportunity for you to convince the owners of these websites that they should link to your renewed content instead of the old content they are currently linking to.

First, make sure that whatever blog post you are targeting is up to date and relevant for your audience.

Use backlink checking tools to find out what websites are linking to your competitor’s post. Once you have spotted those external websites, reach out to their owners and inform them that they are linking to outdated and irrelevant content, and they should consider linking to your updated content.

In most scenarios, these website owners will respond very positively, and you’ll see a rapid increase in your website’s backlinks.

Building brand name and increasing customer loyalty

If most of the content on your website is outdated, the chances are that people still visit your old content, and it represents the whole persona of your brand for them.

If you keep updating your content, your customers will get a signal that you are quite passionate about this content. Furthermore, it will tell them that you are not here just to generate money by creating new content; your real purpose is to help them and provide them value.

This will increase your customer’s trust in you and your brand, which will cause your loyal customer base to grow.

Updating SEO practices

SEO guidelines for content keep on evolving, and this makes your old SEO-optimized content outdated.

Blogs and articles were structured differently a few years ago because they were written in compliance with the old SEO guidelines. 

While you are updating the content in your old posts, you should also structure these posts according to the newer SEO guidelines. This will help your whole website in being up to date with the latest SEO guidelines.

As you keep updating your website, search engines will start indexing it more frequently.

Getting more results with little effort

2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated on the internet every 24 hours. 

With this much new content being added every day, getting your new content ranked is really difficult.

In contrast, your old content was once successful, and search engines are comparatively more familiar with it.

When you revise your old content, search engines rank it higher than any newer posts created in the same category. Renewing old content is also considerably easier than generating new ideas and writing content on them.

By revising your old post, you fundamentally get a new post without actually creating one. 

Choosing the content that should be renewed

Breathing a new life into your old content can be fairly helpful for increasing your website’s ranking, but it doesn’t mean that you should revise and upload all your old content. Sadly some of the older content on your website still has no chance of generating traffic or views, and spending time renewing this kind of content will be a waste of your resources.

The first step to reversing the age of your content is identifying which content is worth your time and energy.

Google analytics can be helpful for you in identifying the content that still has the potential to rise. Just open the Google analytics of your website and look at the web pages that are doing well. Google Analytics will also inform you about the bounce rate and average time spend on a particular page.

Also, mark the pages with the most links using the Google search console.

Once you have collected all this data, now you should look for the following pages

• Pages with high traffic but low conversion rates contain content that people are interested in, but they are not optimized very well.
• Pages with a high conversion rate but low traffic are already doing well in generating leads, and if traffic to these pages is increased, these leads can be easily doubled or tripled.
• Pages that were once popular; these pages were once very well ranked and used to get many social shares and views. But the traffic they generate now is considerably less than the traffic they used to generate back in the day.

Now that you have identified the pages with the potential to do better start with the top 10-20 posts.

Don’t try to update all your old content at once; choose a dozen or so posts first, revise and upload them and then wait for the results to show up. Then, if all goes well, take the next dozen or so posts and repeat the whole process until all the chosen content is updated.

Updating Keywords

The keywords that were popular a few months or years ago may not be as popular now. Identify the keywords used in your old content and recheck them to see if people still search them or not. If some of the keywords are not being searched anymore, update them with better keywords.

You can also add new keywords to your old content for better optimization. Focusing on just primary keywords is not enough; you should also look into updating and adding secondary keywords.

Improve the title tags, headlines, and metadata

While updating your content, you have a good opportunity to optimize your title tags, headline, and metadata for a better user experience. Updating the metadata and title tag also increases the chance of a good ranking for your web page.

Headlines are the main representation of your content; people decide whether they will spend time reading the whole blog or article based on their impression of the headline. So take your time reading and improving every single headline, and the chances of your content doing well in terms of views will increase.

Bottom line

If your website is up and running for quite some time now, you should consider going through your old content with the intent of finding the pages that still have the potential to do well. 

Instead of focusing on creating as much new content as possible, you should shift some of your focus to updating your old content.

Updated old content is primarily new content that requires lesser effort to be made. After fixing your old web pages, you’ll start seeing good results within a couple of months.

What percentage of your website’s content is outdated? And how do you plan to fix it?