Did you know that optimizing old content on a website can provide many benefits to your website’s ranking in search engines?
If you think that creating a website is enough to bring in customers, that’s a big mistake. You must create quality content that is optimized consistently.
You must still optimize the published content to stay in high rankings and generate visitors.
Creating website content every day is indeed very good for ranking in search engines. But it would also be better to keep optimizing your old content. Don’t just focus on creating new content, but you also need to maintain the relevance of your old content.
A website that has a lot of content, of course, needs special attention, because you are not only focused on creating new content, but also maintaining the ranking of your old content.
To keep your old content ranking high in search engines, make sure that you optimize it appropriately. If you want to optimize your old content, reading this article to the end is the right decision.
How to optimize old content on the website
You need to know that the content with the title / keyword you are targeting is also created by dozens or even hundreds of competitors. That’s why you should optimize old content because there are many people who create content like yours every time.
So here’s how to optimize old content on your website:
1. Analyze Your Old Content and Identify What Should Be Improved
The first step you should take is to identify your old content. Maybe by the time you publish content, it gets a high ranking resulting in more visitors.
But maybe after a few months or years, the performance of the content decreases so that the ranking is replaced by your competitors. So that content that used to generate a lot of visitors has now lost its interest.
So in order for your content to stay in the leading position and generate visitors, you need to improve its performance if it has begun to be displaced by your competitors. Find out what you should improve on by looking at your competitors’ content.
Keep in mind that there is always room for improvement especially since the content is getting older then it risks becoming less relevant. Search engines like Google always make hundreds of changes to their algorithms every year.
So, maybe a piece of content gets a high rating for a while, then suddenly drops due to algorithm updates. That’s why optimizing old content is one of making it more relevant to search engines and users.
2. Edit the Content that Needs to be Edited
Not all old content you have to edit, just content that ranks down or is not even indexed by Google anymore. Sometimes old content can also lose index because there is a lot of new content that may be created every day.
The next way to optimize old content is to choose which content needs to be improved. Websites that have a lot of content, need extra attention because there may be a lot of content that is already irrelevant.
Content that is no longer relevant to what Google wants, then Google will ignore it, therefore sometimes the old content is no longer indexed. So in order for Google to re-index old content, then you need to fix what needs to be fixed.
You can edit content, titles, images and optimize on-page SEO to improve the performance of your content again. Re-ask Google to index your content.
3. Reissue and Distribution Strategy
Once your content has been edited or improved, the next step is to republish and distribute with a new date. This will make your content re-indexed by search engines like Google.
How to optimize old content to rank high in search engine search results:
- Update post date – Did you know that by republishing content with a new date can send a signal to search engines and readers that you are publishing new, more content
- Resubmit re-indexing – Once the old content is published with the latest date, the next step is to request a re-index by utilizing Google’s Google Search Console tool. This will help your content be automatically recrawled in the next few days or weeks.
4. Optimize Technical SEO
Not only focusing on content quality or onpage SEO, but you also focus on technical SEO. This is very important because technical SEO is very influential on search engine rankings and also user experience.
In addition to presenting relevant content, you are also required to provide a better user experience. Therefore, you need to optimize technical SEO to improve the user experience as well as to improve search engine rankings.
Optimizing technical SEO means improving:
- Page Loading Speed – One of the ways to optimize old content that you need to do improves the speed of your website. In addition to improving the user experience, loading speed also greatly affects the ranking of your web content.
- Responsive / Mobile Friendly – To reach mobile device users, your website must be designed to be responsive to various devices such as desktop and mobile.
- Broken Links – Broken links are serious problems that you need to solve quickly, as this can affect the performance of your website. By making content improvements, you are at the same time fixing broken links.
Benefits of Optimizing Old Content on a Website
A website that was built a few years ago and has a lot of old content certainly needs to be optimized more extra. Content that may no longer be relevant will no longer serve to attract visitors let alone conversions.
Well here are some of the benefits of optimizing old content that you will get:
1. Make Your Old Content More Relevant
Content created 1, 2, 3 years ago may no longer be relevant to the wishes of search engines and users. That’s how optimizing old content will make your website have relevant content.
You can lose out if you ignore old content that might have been your traffic source. Content that is constantly optimized will maintain its high ranking, which will also continue to generate traffic.
2. As a Source of Traffic
Content that is optimized appropriately, will be a source of traffic because it allows search engines to improve their rankings.
This is one of the benefits you will get from improving the content and optimizing for search engines and users. Your content can be re-rayed and has the opportunity to be ranked high by search engines such as Google.
Old content that is edited more relevantly can be a source of your traffic constantly so that it can increase conversions.
3. Increase Customer Trust
Wouldn’t a business that always gives customers what they need well will be more trusted? That’s how with the benefits of optimizing old content, the edited content by making it more relevant to current searches will be liked by your customers.
When you present content that remains relevant it will build customer trust in your business. So that’s why websites that already have old content must also be optimized to stay relevant to users’ searches.
4. Maintain Rankings or Improve Rankings
Previously we have explained that content that targets certain keywords is definitely also created by your competitors. So if you created content in the last year and didn’t optimize it maybe the ranking is already displaced by new content from your competitors.
Not only does it maintain rankings, optimizing old content can also help improve rankings. If your content becomes more relevant to search engines and users then this leads your content to the top of the search results.
5. Increase Conversions and Sales
Isn’t one of your goals of creating content to get conversions and sales? So that your website content generates visitors who end up converting, optimizing old content is one way you can run.
Optimized content can get high rankings as well as more traffic. And of course this can increase conversions and sales.
Conclusion
In order for the content you create to continue to provide benefits, optimizing old content and new content is the right way.
Don’t just focus on creating new content, but also take advantage of old content to continue to bring in quality visitors. So that your content generates long-term profits.
If you want to maintain your website with the right techniques so that the ranking of your content is maintained and even increased, please use the website maintenance service from Web Studio.
We make sure your website is managed properly using effective techniques to improve the performance of your website.
