With ad rates stifled, Google updates, and whatever else might be affecting your site, there has never been a better time to take an honest look at your content. So important to audit and IMPROVE your content. “Query deserves freshness” is such an underrated technique to recover keyword rankings, traffic and revenue. I don’t care how wonderful a page might be, it might be optimized and enjoying top three ranking positions for now, but left untouched and neglected over time, it will absolutely start a gradual descent in the SERPS as competitors slowly chip away at your ranking position. I’m going to run an experiment, and I encourage other to do this also. The test is this. I am going to update 4 articles per day, and will measure impact week over week, and report back here with results in one month.
Updates to include as many of the following as possible: add content, add more images, add relevant Youtube video, add a few more internal links, add external links, make sure primary keyword frequency is where it needs to be (this is a big one, I was surprised how poorly my content was optimized for this when I audited my pages. Facepalm.).
But also, by updating your page on site and then re-indexing in search console, the page gets time-stamped with today’s date and I believe is a huge ranking factor with Google as it tells Google that this information on this page is current, relevant, and deserves good rankings.
I like to pull all pages from Big Data Analytics with these metrics only: EPMV, Pageviews, and average word count. Add whatever other metrics you like, but I like to keep it simple. Study and analyze. Filter. After some time, you will know which content needs to be updated and improved.
Can also target ‘pages without revenue’, but for me, these pages are a bit beyond hope and should probably be removed and 301 to homepage lol.
At any rate, go on a rampage and update the #$@t out of your pages and see what kind of lift you get. Tweak and tailor this strategy as you see fit. I will report back with results on April 23rd.
