In the ever-evolving world of search engines, Google algorithm updates have become a buzzword for websites striving to rank high and reach their target audience. These updates are mysterious forces that can either make or break a website’s online presence.

Imagine waking up one day to find that your website has dropped in search engine ranking and your traffic has plunged. It feels like being stranded on an island with no way to escape, wondering what went wrong and how to fix it. This is the impact of an algorithm update, which can send shivers down any website owner’s spine.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Algorithm updates are Google’s way of refining and improving the search experience for users. By rewarding websites with high-quality content, good user experience, and following SEO best practices, Google is helping users find the information they need quickly and easily.

So as a website owner, it’s essential to understand that each algorithm update is unique, and its impact can vary depending on several factors. However, by creating valuable content and providing an exceptional overall user experience, site owners like us can build resilience to algorithm updates and maintain their search engine ranking and traffic.

So, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, here are a couple of actionable steps you can take right now to embrace the challenge of algorithm updates and adapting your website to meet the ever-changing demands of the search engine. 

1. Analyze your website’s search performance on Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an essential tool that provides valuable insights into the performance of your website on search engine result pages (SERP), allowing you to filter historical data according to your specific needs. 

• To begin, select your website property from the dropdown menu located in the top left panel of the Google Search Console dashboard. 
• From there, navigate to the “performance” section and click on “search results.” The performance dashboard will then display important metrics, such as total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position. These metrics are crucial for understanding your website’s search performance and future projection.
• To proceed, ensure that the search type is set to “web” and select a date range of 6-12 months. This timeframe allows you to identify the impact of Google’s algorithms and compare current performance stats with previous data. 

• Once you have selected the appropriate metrics, activate the “average position,” “total clicks,” “CTR,” and “total impressions” graphs. 

• Then scroll down to the “pages” tab and order the pages based on the highest clicks, although you can choose to sort by average position or impressions.
• Lastly, compare the metrics to determine which pages need improvement. By comparing clicks, impressions, and CTR, you can identify pages that are not performing as expected these are the pages you want to first look at.

To begin the optimization process, first, you can review your Google Analytics data and identify pages that have experienced significant traffic loss after the update. Alternatively, you can tell just by looking at the performance chart and how avg. Positions, impressions, and clicks are heading compared to the previous couple of months.

• Once you have a page in your mind, you will need to select it from the list pages, and it automatically gets set as a filter along with the date and web settings you previously established.
• Once the page filter is set, you must navigate to the “queries” tab and analyze the top keywords for that page that are generating the most impressions. You can then activate the impression, clicks, CTR, and SERP position to compare the best keywords for the particular page.

• With this data, you can adjust your content to optimize for the best-performing keyword while also paying attention to other top keywords. (It’s important to note that using these keywords to update your page only pertains to keyword optimization, as you still need to ensure the page provides maximum value and a pleasant user experience.)
• This way, you can extract a list of pages that have been hit by the latest algorithm update to your Excel sheet, which gives you a filtered approach to try and recover a part of traffic by optimizing your pages for keywords and potentially driving more people than before.

2. Update your content structure

To make your article reach people and gain their love, you need to first make it lovable to Google. But how can you do that? Google doesn’t know what you are writing, but it knows what makes an article great. It’s all about making it to the first page of Google SERP. 

Google compares your content to the existing top-ranking content to determine how your page measures up. So the trick is to reverse engineer what the top articles are doing to get themselves to the top!

So before creating your article, the first step would be to create an outline that surpasses your competition. 

# Prepare your heading structure:

To do this, you need to determine the heading structure and ideal word count for your article. You can search your topic on Google and analyze the top-ranking content. Take note of the heading structure and the length of the article. 

You can also look at the second and third articles to gather more headings to include in your outline. This will result in a better outline because it encompasses all the articles that are currently ranking. You can also use tools like Frase to collect a set of headlines without manually analyzing each top-ranking page.

# Optimizer for readers and add keywords that Google would love to see:

When it comes to writing, avoid fluffing around and get straight to the point. For example, if someone is searching for how to make a website in WordPress, they likely already know what a website is and don’t need an introduction. 

When updating existing articles, you can use the keywords you have previously discovered on the GSC queries dashboard, as well as other semantic words that Google would like to find on your page. For this task, you can use tools like Surfer SEO, Frase, and SEMrush to enrich your content with relevant words that will improve your page’s relevance.

One way you can do this is by using the keywords you have discovered for a page on Google search console and then using those keywords in a content optimizer tool like Frase and letting it help you optimize the content compared to the best content on Google.

# Optimizer for FAQ and SERP:

Next, write the answers to queries in a Google-friendly format. Keep it simple and direct. For example, if someone is searching for “Does Ahref have a content optimizer tool?” you can answer with a simple sentence like “No, Ahrefs does not have a content optimizer tool yet.” 

This type of answer makes it extremely easy for Google’s language algorithm to know that you’ve answered the question, and it can skyrocket your chances of getting into the featured snippet on top of Google search.

# Add Schema to your content

Using schema markup can be incredibly useful for ranking on Google because it helps search engines better understand the content on your website. You can use RankRanger’s schema markup generator to create and validate your FAQ, Article easily, and How to schemas to your HTML code in a way that is machine-readable, allowing search engines to understand the content on your website easily.

With schema, your content has a higher chance of appearing in feature snippets, and people also ask for sections on SERP. For FAQs, you can search your topic on Google and then pick some of the most relevant questions to your topic from the PEOPLE ALSO ASK section and then try to answer those questions clearly and easier way on your page. 

Use an accordion plugin on your WordPress site to assign those FAQs and enable FAQ schema or RankRanger’s FAQ schema generator. 

3. Focus on Topical Authority

Topical authority refers to the expertise and trustworthiness a website earns by producing high-quality and informative content on a particular topic. The more quality content a website has on a specific subject, the more it becomes known as an authoritative resource. This enhances the site’s reputation among readers and improves its chances of being favored by Google for ranking purposes.

If you feel that your website lacks coverage on a particular topic, assessing your existing content may be worthwhile and considering scaling up your coverage. By producing more quality content on a specific subject, you can demonstrate your expertise and become a more reliable source of information for readers while also improving your search engine rankings.

# Create a topical map

To start creating your content strategy, it’s important first to develop a topical map that includes all the relevant topics that need to be covered. You can utilize a keyword research tool like Chat GPT to generate this map by building clusters of topics around the main subject and identifying relevant child topics. 

However, using a reliable keyword research tool to discover keywords around these topics is also recommended. While Chat GPT can assist in creating topic clusters and relevant child topics, it may not provide enough data on the actual keywords that users are searching for on Google.

You can also read this case study on how you can use ChatGPT to research keywords on your site. 

In addition, if you have pages on your website that cover random topics and receive low traffic, it would be beneficial to repurpose those pages to cover topics that align with the main themes of your site.

# Create a bond between relevant articles by interlinking

Now that you have a well-planned relevant article on your website, you can seal the deal by interlinking them and creating a net to show search engines how highly relevant your articles are!

A well-planned internal linking strategy can significantly impact your website’s search engine ranking because it distributes the authority of your website’s high-authority pages to other pages on your website. This means that a well-structured internal linking profile can have a similar impact to high-quality external backlinks.

If you cannot interlink naturally between the pages, you can use a plugin like Link Whisper that automates the linking process and find natural key phrases to link between your website pages. 

4. Run a full site audit

A website that has great content but is not optimized for technical SEO is like a book that is well-written but has no index or table of contents. Search engines will have a hard time understanding the content’s relevance and ranking it appropriately.

To improve the technical SEO of your website, it’s essential to conduct a thorough audit. Various tools, such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, can scan your site and identify any technical issues hindering your SEO efforts. 

These audits cover a range of aspects, including website speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, site architecture, XML sitemap, robots.txt file, canonical tags, schema markup, and more.

By conducting a single audit, you can uncover all the ongoing issues and take the necessary steps to fix them one by one. While missing meta tags or breadcrumbs may not be major issues, ensuring that your site is error-free can provide a significant advantage over your competitors. 

By addressing technical SEO issues and keeping your site up-to-date with the latest algorithm updates, you can ensure that your website is in top shape and provides search engine crawlers with the best possible user experience.

5. Check and improve site speed

Page speed is a crucial factor that affects SEO. With the introduction of Google’s Algorithm Speed Update, it’s become evident that slow-loading pages can negatively impact your rankings. In addition to being a direct ranking factor, slow page speed can indirectly affect your rankings by increasing bounce rates and reducing dwell time. 

If your pages take too long to load, Google may prioritize other sites offering similar value but with a better page loading experience. To avoid falling behind the competition, ensuring that your pages load as quickly as possible is crucial. 

You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to test your pages and identify areas for improvement. 

Additionally, Google Search Console provides Web Vitals data that reflects real-world user experience on your pages. By keeping your Web Vitals stats in good shape, you can rest assured that SERP won’t impact your site due to poor page performance.

If your page speed is poor and your Google Web vital status has failed, you have a few options to fix the issue. You can try to improve it on your own or enlist the help of speed improvement experts to ensure your site passes the web’s vital records. One such expert is Team Speedy Site, and if you use the coupon code WISPEED50, you can receive a $50 discount on your first order with them.

6. Finally, prepare a link-building plan

Improving your website’s ranking and traffic requires a solid link-building plan that aligns with Google’s algorithm. Link building is still very relevant in 2023 and remains a deciding factor in high-competition SERPs. 

While working on other foundational pillars like topical authority, a strong backlink profile can protect your site from Google algorithm updates. Your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) largely depend on links and mentions on authoritative sites.

However, link-building is not an easy task to accomplish. You need to build links that work in 2023. One of the best link-building strategies is guest posting. You can do it in-house or hire a reliable service like Authority Builders. Another strategy I like is to insert links in existing articles by outreaching yourself with a quality page or again taking help from Authority Builders.

Additionally, you can get mention links by helping a reporter out (HARO) or by creating newsworthy content and outreaching journalists for links. Building a high-quality backlink profile is essential to your website’s success in the long run.

Semrush’s link-building tool is another great way to find prospects that you can reach out to and might help quicken the process overall.

ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool for keyword research. Its machine learning and language models give it the power to uncover great keywords that can be used to optimize SEO. We’ve seen some creative and innovative examples of how Twitter users have been able to use ChatGPT for this purpose. 

Today we’ll dive deeper into how ChatGPT can help you with keyword research and showcase the potential of the AI-powered platform.

Different Types of Keyword Research and Analysis

There are several ways to identify which keywords best suit your website. You can use keyword research and analysis to help you determine the right terms to target. 

Keyword Discovery: This technique involves figuring out the most popular and relevant terms your target audience uses. 

Competitor Analysis: Analyzing the keywords used by your competitors can help you determine which terms they are targeting. 

Search Volume Analysis: This method estimates the number of searches for a particular keyword or phrase. Keyword Difficulty Analysis: This process helps you determine the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword or phrase. 

Long-Tail Keyword Research: Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific, less competitive search terms. Identifying these terms can help you create more targeted content. 

Keyword Clustering: Keyword Clustering involves grouping related keywords together to create more targeted content.

Can Chat GPT Fulfill Your Keyword Research Needs?

Typical keyword tools like Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush are powered by huge databases that can be used to help you find the best keywords for any given topic. With these tools, you can explore related keywords or even longer-tailed keywords that contain your initial keyword search.

These tools likely use a combination of algorithms that can comprehend your search query and its related concepts, as well as data that reveals what people are searching for. Combining these two elements, these tools can provide you with the most relevant results with data.

ChatGPT, unlike traditional keyword research tools, utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to comprehend the meaning behind your query and suggest related keywords. This means it can provide you with a different type of suggestion, but it also means that it’s limited in the sense that it doesn’t have access to data from actual searches. 

Despite the fact that AI is limited when it comes to providing you with Data, it still can help you with keyword research and analysis by skipping the work you need to put in to find those keywords and phrases relevant to your target search term. In addition, it’s handy to find and filter your keywords as you want just by sending a custom prompt to the AI and having your data set ready within seconds. 

Let’s take a look into how Chat GPT fits into different types of keyword analysis and research needs:

1. Discover New Keywords

ChatGPT is an incredibly versatile tool for keyword discovery. All you have to do is ask it for relevant keywords. You can then narrow your keyword search with audience specifications or add filters to your query. 

For example, you want to find out long tail keyword keywords related to copywriting. You can prompt it like “Make a list of keywords related to ‘copywriting‘ that one might search on Google.”

Now that you have some major keywords, you can find some long-tail keywords targeting beginner copywriters. The prompt goes, “adjust this list of keywords related to ‘copywriting’ with beginners in mind.”

Again, suppose you want to follow the programmatic content approach by duplicating the keyword style and changing the variables according to your need. In that case, Chat GPT makes this entire process looks effortless. 

For instance, you can ask the AI to {Make a list of keywords by changing the state name for all states in United States ‘Best Copywriting Agency in California’}, and it will give you the exact list you want without you having to look for all the state names as the variables.

When brainstorming new keywords, Chat GPT is among the top tools even though it misses out on one key component, volume, which SEOs use to determine the keyword’s worth. 

It’s faster than most of the mainstream keyword research tools in finding out keywords and is highly flexible, and has great room for your creativity.

2. Competitor’s Content Analysis

Unfortunately, ChatGPT does not let you just input a competitor’s URL into a tool like Ahrefs to get a list of keywords they are ranking for. The only way to do a competitor analysis is to feed the text from their page into ChatGPT and ask it to identify the keywords.

This sounds like time-consuming work, and the output would still not be accurate. In addition, you will miss out on metrics like keyword competition, volume, and current trends. 

Regardless, you can still use ChatGPT to extract a list of long tail keywords from a selected text like this example; you can ask the AI to make a list of 20 long tail keywords from the following text: “{copied article}.” I know it sounds like a lot of work, and some tools can do it much better than Chat GPT, but Chat GPT is not a dedicated keyword research tool either.

We copied a full article about a streaming application called Kodi from a random webpage, and chat GPT gave us a keyword list that was not really impressive on what we wanted to find out: 

So we asked if Chat GPT could recheck this. The revised list is actually pretty impressive and closely related to what we gathered from Ahrefs and Semrush on this topic.

It would not be worth your time to use Chat GPT for competitor analysis. Instead, you should stick to the traditional keyword research tools because they offer more valuable information. In addition, this process is quite time-consuming, and keep in mind that there is a limit to the amount of text you can copy and paste at once before ChatGPT gives you an error message.

3. Search Volume Analysis

ChatGPT (March 14 version) can provide you with keyword volume estimation from Google Keyword Planner. Although Chat GPT is not designed to provide this kind of information, you can ask the AI to provide you with a set of keywords with their respective volumes and competition data. 

It looks like Chat GPT can access or read data from Google keyword Planner; although, when I asked the AI about geotargeting it indicated that the data represents Global search volume, which is what we will cross-check shortly.

If you ask, “Can you provide me keyword volume and competition data for 10 long tail keywords related to this term {Copywriting}” – here’s what Chat GPT gave us:

When I attempted to verify the keyword volume and competition using the keyword planner, I found that the data didn’t exactly match what ChatGPT provided. 

We’re not entirely sure how ChatGPT is obtaining these keyword volumes, but it’s possible that different tools and algorithms may yield different results. Similarly, the competition data didn’t match my findings on the keyword planner, but the competition information corresponded for certain countries.

4. Long Tail Keyword Research

You may have noticed that I requested the tool to generate a list of “long tail” keywords, and it delivered exactly that. However, it’s important to note that the accuracy of these keywords in terms of matching real-world search queries from people cannot be guaranteed. 

Nevertheless, the tool provides a lot of relevant output that you can actually use to guide your content creation process. You can instruct the tool to help you write and piece together information during the content creation time based on the keywords it suggests.

In that case, Chat GPT is a faster and easier solution than other keyword research tools just to find some potential long-tail keywords and blend them into the content so your output is more relevant if we consider content creation with AI support. 

To find long tail keywords about any topic, you have to pass the prompt as “make a list of {count} long tail keywords for this term {your term} where minimum word count per keyword is 5”, setting up word count as a filter here to avoid shorter keywords.

And here’s what we got:

5. Keyword Clustering

When grouping similar keywords or phrases into clusters based on their semantic relevance or topical similarity, Keyword clustering is the technique to go for. You can create more focused and relevant content around specific themes or topics by grouping related keywords together. 

This helps you to create organized content and a well-structured website that benefits the visitors to find what they’re looking for in the site website. In addition, focused keyword clustering can increase click-through rates across the content because of their relevancy. 

By grouping related keywords together, it becomes easier to identify gaps in your site’s content, making it easier to target new keywords.

Keyword clustering is easy with tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush, but with Chat GPT, it’s faster and has more freedom to tweak it the way you want. For example, you want to create a cluster of informative and commercial keywords and their volume for your main term, ‘Copywriting.’

We asked Chat GPT: “Make a list of long tail keywords for Copywriting and cluster them based on keyword search intent as well as include search volume.”

After we provided the AI with a list of long-tail keywords related to copywriting, we requested it to present the data in a table format. The table can be very useful in planning your website’s content without manually extracting keywords from various keyword research tools. 

However, it is important to note that the accuracy of these keywords may not be entirely reliable, so it is important to exercise caution when using them as the basis for your content planning.

And YES, you can easily copy and paste the table created by Chat GPT to your preferred text editor or software. This means you can quickly generate any table you need by simply providing the relevant data as a prompt and asking the AI to create the table. It’s that easy!

6. Chat GPT Prompts for Title Creation

Titles are important in case you want to guide your content production team to have a list of Titles per keyword with AI assistance; you have to ask Chat GPT to include Titles that are optimized for SEO and convey the catchiness and content intent.

We asked Chat GPT to add a catchy article title for all these keywords in the same table that matches the keyword in the title.

There are so many fantastic opportunities to explore with Chat GPT! You can use it to research, plan, create and verify your content production, which is incredible. Of course, if you’re looking to create content using AI, it’s essential to be careful and avoid any issues with duplication or plagiarism. 

That’s where Originality.AI comes in – it’s the perfect tool to protect your content from being detected as AI-generated and prevent accidental plagiarism with other content on the web.

We’re working on putting together a list of prompts you can use on Chat GPT to take your content production to the next level with AI support. So stay tuned to Websiteincome.com to get access to this excellent resource! And while you’re there, check out other articles and information on online business development. It has many ideas and insights to help you build your next idea.

ChatGPT is an Inspiring artificial intelligence tool that can make your life much easier. It can be a valuable tool when it comes to content marketing, and Chat GPT definitely can assist you in upgrading your productivity.

Despite having some major limitations to match its hype in the media, ChatGPT is quite impressive, at least as a product very much a work in progress. Its generation capabilities are particularly useful.

So ChatGPT by your side, you will be able to craft an e-mail copy effortlessly, dissect customer data, to prepare your marketing plan to drive conversions and boost revenue.

Let’s take a look at how you can use ChatGPT to improve your marketing strategies and upgrade your content production. 

1. Brainstorming content ideas:

Finding new ideas for content is a challenging aspect of content marketing as a whole. Generating fresh and engaging ideas that fit into your website niche will attract and retain an audience can be difficult, which makes it challenging.

So you can ask your AI assistant to find out ideas that are relevant to your site. OpenAI excels at generating numerous ideas once you give it a single concept as input. Its technology is based on predicting the next word in content, which makes it highly skilled at expanding ideas once you have given it a starting point.

For example, if you have a site that discusses mobile apps, now you can ask the AI what industries can be benefited from using mobile apps.

“What are the top 10 industries that can benefit from using mobile apps”.

Now ChatGPT has covered industries that we have not touched on in our blog topics. This can be really helpful to expand your website’s content reach and fits well for programmatic SEO, which we will come into later.

Then you can split the main ideas into sub-ideas to follow a top-down design before finding out low competitive keywords for each sub-category you can cover on your blog.

When I ask ChatGPT, “Can you provide ideas of categories related to app in Food and hospitality industry,” it gives me the type of apps we can talk about in the food and hospitality industry.

2. Upgrade existing content:

People are hyped about using ChatGPT to generate tons of content, but we overlook that one of the most impactful ways to utilize this AI tool is to enhance the existing content and tailor it to a specific audience. 

We have previously discussed how to find content for upgrades, how it can help you stay in the competition, and how many SEO agencies leverage this strategy to boost site traffic and overall conversion without crafting content from scratch. 

ChatGPT has incredible potential to elevate what you already have because you are providing enough input for it to play with and use its intelligence to upgrade the overall output quality.

You can ask ChatGPT to upgrade certain phrases on your posts: “explain the following for better understanding: [paste the text].”

Here’s what I get.

In this instance, the AI statement may appear disconnected from the prior discussion; however, utilizing ChatGPT as your helper, you can experiment with various approaches to arrive at a clearer and more comprehensive explanation.

3. Accelerating content creation while reducing expenses

Copywriting is the most obvious way of using Chat GPT in digital marketing. Using the typical Chat Open AI website, you can produce tons of content which should significantly reduce your content production cost.

If you can go one step ahead, you have the resources to leverage Open AI API and generate a large number of contents (on a scale of 200+) in just a couple of hours. If you cover an average of 1000 words per article, that is more than 2,00,000 words. 

There are several options for accomplishing this task. On WordPress, you can install a plugin to generate content and send it to post draft automatically. You can utilize the API to generate multiple pieces of content simultaneously using a spreadsheet for a more innovative approach.

Here’s a basic illustration of using OpenAI API and Google Excel to broaden your content ideas and establish the fundamental components of a comprehensive content collection.

4. Writing cold emails enquiring about backlinks

Backlinks still play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) and can significantly boost a website’s performance in search engine result pages (SERP). Backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites serve as a vote of confidence in your website. 

This can add credibility and trustworthiness to your pages in the eyes of both search engines and users.

Although you can’t generate backlinks 🙂 like you generate content using ChatGPT, there’s a way this AI tool will significantly reduce your work creating cold emails. You can use Semrush Link Building Tool to collect prospects and their email address before running your OpenAI API to generate multiple outreach templates for different purposes.

5. Generate content FAQs

FAQs are an important aspect of SEO. FAQs often include relevant keywords that can help improve a website’s ranking for those keywords. A well-designed FAQ section is a way to provide quick answers to common questions related to your topics. 

In addition, by providing concise and clear answers to common questions, a website may be more likely to appear as a featured snippet in search results. They help expand your content cover, and that may increase the overall authority and credibility of the web pages.

Creating FAQs with chat GPT is fun. You don’t have to dig for questions as the tool gets you the question with a near-perfect answer. You can just ask ChatGPT to create FAQs about certain topics or keywords, and it will come up with a bunch of those. All you have to do is select the ones that make sense to the page contents.

6. Easy to Execute Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO involves the creation of large numbers of pages for a website using a standardized template and a data set. The pages appear to have been created individually, but they are generated using a systematic process.

The primary advantage of ranking for a large number of smaller keywords with less competition and search volume, rather than relying on a few big keywords. 

This strategy reduces the risk of significantly dropping website traffic if Google changes the ranking for your major keywords. The strategy is similar to a long-tail approach, and it’s like spreading out eggs across many baskets, making it less vulnerable to changes in ranking.

Now, one of the main issues in Programmatic SEO is that most parts of the content remain the same because it’s a template and variable-based approach. That’s a major content duplication issue. 

So by harnessing ChatGPT’s content creation ability, you can generate unique content across the variable matrix just by following what we did to generate the email outreach template.

Once your content machine setup is ready, you have a couple of things to take care of:

1. Make sure your website’s content is helpful and original.
2. Check that your website is listed in Google Search Console.
3. Ensure that each page on your site has unique content.
4. Build a valid XML sitemap to help search engines index your site’s pages.
5. Interlink various pages on your site to create a strong internal linking structure.

The most important part?

It is important for you to use ChatGPT ethically and responsibly, ensuring the information provided is accurate and up-to-date. 

Overall, incorporating ChatGPT into a content marketing strategy has the potential to increase your efficiency and enhance the quality of content.

Similar posts:

1. How do you find out contents that need updating
2. 5 Best AI Content Generators Reviewed – Can Google Detect AI-Generated Content?
3. WriteSonic Examples – Can Google Detect WriteSonic Content

Regular ideation and creation of new blog content form a strong content marketing approach. But what about poor-performing and outdated articles on your site? 

Revamping old content can boost your strategy and is a step worth taking. Not every article will drive organic traffic. For every successful post, there may be many others hidden deep in your blog in need of improvement. 

These articles deserve your attention. Revising old articles provides an opportunity to optimize and make them more appealing, which could lead to higher search engine rankings and more traffic. This also diversifies your strategy, rather than relying solely on creating new content.

Having outdated or poorly written content on your website can have a negative effect on your brand’s reputation. When you neglect the quality of your content, it sends a message that you do not value your audience. 

This lack of consideration can then lead to decreased traffic, fewer clicks, and reduced social media engagement. 

A well-crafted, up-to-date, and relevant content strategy is crucial for maintaining a positive image for your brand and connecting with your target audience.

Does updating content help SEO?

The freshness of content has been an important factor in determining the ranking of a website on Google’s search results since 2011. 

We all know Google uses various factors, including the date when a document was created, to determine the ranking of search results, which suggests that the date of creation or date of modification of a document is one of the factors considered using by Google algorithm when ranking search results.

The latest and updated information is given more weight by search engines, causing older content to decline in rank gradually. Revising and refreshing outdated pieces conveys to search engines that your content is current, accurate, and relevant. 

Moreover, search engines regularly alter their algorithms, and updating your content ensures you adapt to any on-page SEO modifications that may otherwise negatively affect your performance.

Less time investment, better result: revising an outdated article on your website much is quicker than creating a new one and would probably be able to turn it into top-quality content with an increased possibility of driving organic traffic. 

I don’t mean to say that you should stop creating new content altogether, but allocating time to both activities has the potential to achieve results with less effort.

Again, if audience engagement with your content is a metric Google uses to identify content that has a better impact or probably covers more comprehensive information about a topic, then updating your old content could be the most effective way to improve engagement other than improving site performance, designs, etc. 

Therefore, you can definitely say updating older content positively impacts SEO.

What is your ideal strategy for updating content on a website?

Revising old content can still be labor-intensive, especially for established websites. So you need the plan to identify content that is worth updating and make the best use of your time. Then you will have to figure out exactly what improvement a piece of content needs to perform better in SERP.

So here’s what we do when we are executing a plan to upgrade the content on a certain website.

1. Conduct a quick win content audit

The goal is to identify those contents that are close to being ranked high on search engines. The objective is to find and make slight improvements to the content to increase its ranking and make it more visible to users on search engines.

These are contents you have published previously and doing really great in the SERP by ranking multiple keywords but have not really ranked in the top #1 or #3 positions as you would have loved to.

So a quick win audit will help you find these moderately ranking contents. You can do such audits via Ahrefs by checking the organic keyword’s position for your website. But there’s another way I would like to include here:

For this method; you will need your site connected to the Google search console. If you have not done yet, check this guide. After a new connection, you might have to wait a couple of days for GSC to pull data from your site and populate their search performance dashboard.

For others who already have the search console collecting data for your site, open Google search console > go to search results.

Then make sure the search type is selected as web and the query tab is selected just below the performance graph.

Now, if you enable the average position filter it gives you the most updated avg. SERP position data for the queries in all countries. You don’t have to look at the overall average position number but look at the position data for each query to get an idea of pages that are ranking for those queries.

Here, what we want to do is add a filter to positions where the position value is greater than 3. This will give you all the keywords with an average ranking below 3 and then you have a list of high-performing keywords to optimize for where your pages are between position 3 and 15 or you can pick 20 as the range to consider content as closely ranking.

Now you have a set of keywords with average ranking data for a particular date range, but you don’t know if your pages are likely to rank even higher in the coming days without needing an update.

So it would be better for you to compare a particular date range, for example, the current 28 days’ data to the previous 28 days’ data, which should provide you with the direction of ranking those pages for particular keywords.

As long as the position difference is in (-) means that your page has improved its position in SERP. Sometimes when the position in the previous day range is 0 means the page was not indexed for that particular query. 

Thus you can filter and analyze pages that are ranking between 3 to 20 positions for top query and are not improving or losing their rank; you can select those pages to your update queue. 

Again, you will have to consider the amount of traffic these keyword brings in so you can enable the click and impression stats to see if a particular page is worth updating for the given query or not. You can always play with these data to collect your most update-worthy pages for the next batch.

2 – Find out contents that used to do well

In this method, the goal is to concentrate efforts on finding out and enhancing content that previously performed well in search engine rankings. 

Content performance may stop its growth and start declining over time as search engines it’s no longer provide relevant information or competing content on the same topic has surpassed it. This is termed Content Decay, as it refers to the decline in ranking and decrease in traffic for a specific keyword.

You can find and analyze these contents by using a two-step method. First, you will have to identify such content via Google analytics >  Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report. 

Once you find the content that has dropped in terms of pageview performance from a previous period (In the example above, I’m using just the previous 30 days, but you should be covering at least a year or two based on the content’s age)

Now that you have the set of low-performing or decaying content, you can use the page URL and inspect it on Ahrefs to find out the organic keyword’s performance and consider whether to update that certain page. 

What to focus on when you are updating content?

The process of updating content begins by identifying which content needs improvement. 

After this, a plan of action needs to be formulated to execute these updates. I would follow these 5 steps to create a better piece of content:

1. Make sure to check that the content remains relevant to the user’s search query and meets their expectations. It’s important that the content’s purpose and focus match the user’s intent behind the original search. This ensures that the updated content continues to provide value and meet the target audience’s needs.
2. As part of updating the content, you should include more in-depth and comprehensive information and details about the topic. The aim is to provide a complete and thorough understanding of the subject matter to the reader, making it a valuable resource for them. This will increase the relevance and usefulness of the content, potentially boosting its search engine rankings.
3. You should be focusing on improving the content in a way that makes it unique and noticeable. The goal is to make the content stand out among similar content on the same topic, making it more appealing and attractive to the reader. This can be achieved through various techniques, such as using visuals, adding interactive elements, or providing a unique perspective on the topic.
4. Next, you should focus on updating the content to reflect current information and removing any information that is no longer accurate. This step helps maintain the accuracy and relevance of the content, which could positively impact its search engine rankings.

Once your new content is ready, you can publish and share the document on social platforms by letting them know that you have newly updated content on a particular topic that is highly searched on search engines that might be worth looking into.

This is an overview of the strategy I personally follow to update the content from time to time, and it has been a promising tool for the overall growth of my primary website portfolio.