EP 21: What the Growth!? – Update Old and Underperforming Content to Boost Organic Ranking

In this episode of What the Growth!? Nick goes through how you can update old and/or underperforming website content to boost its organic ranking on search engines. This is a tactic that Visitor Queue has been using for just a few months, but has already increased traffic around 300%.

Identify Pages That Don’t Rank

You’re going to want to start in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or another website analytics platform that you use. When in there, you want to look for blog articles or other website pages that have decreased in website traffic. Or, older pieces of content that never ranked at all. Google Analytics and Search Console have some very easy ways to do this that you can take advantage of.

Rewrite Content

Once you’ve identified the content that needs updating, you’re going to want to update it. Rewrite it anywhere from 10-80%, depending on the content. I recommend starting with small updates and monitoring its progress. Try rewriting whole paragraphs, changing or adding pictures, and also changing up the structure of the article.

Once complete, I recommend also ensuring the published date is updated so that Google sees that you’ve recently updated the content.

You want to update all the content that needs to be updated over the course of weeks and months. Roughly two to three pieces each week to ensure that Google doesn’t flag your site for updating too much content at once.

Google Search Console

Once updated, don’t forget to resubmit it for indexing on Google Search Console. This will ensure that Google indexes the updated content as soon as possible, and you can start seeing results sooner.

Wrap Up

You’re going to want to continue to monitor your website analytics platform for one to two months after the changes are made to see if your changes helped boost organic ranking. If the changes don’t help, continue to monitor and make small tweaks in order to get the result that you’re looking for. That’s all for this episode of What the Growth!? Don’t forget to subscribe to be notified of next month’s episode.