As a business owner or blogger, your site ranking is vital when it comes to how successful your website is. There are many ways in which a website can increase rankings on search engines, but a majority of these strategies are time-consuming and require a large amount of manpower, which if you are a small business or blogger, then this is something which you simply don’t have.
Sure, you could write, produce and upload content on a more regular basis, but this is complicated and isn’t always guaranteed results. However, one way in which you can increase rankings without a lot of extra work is by updating and refreshing your old website content.
If you want to increase your SEO effectiveness and boost your website traffic, then updating your old content will give you a better ranking score. When you indicate to Google that your site has new content, then you will see a spike in traffic which will make that small amount of work well worth it.
But, refreshing your website also comes with a whole host of other benefits too, all of which will contribute to your website ranking.
Fix Grammar and Spelling Mistakes
This happens to everyone – you’re reading back old posts which were written months or even years ago and you notice a huge and embarrassing spelling mistake. Rather than just ignoring it, thinking that no one will see it, then you could instead spend some time correcting the errors. Whilst Google has said that spelling and grammar aren’t one of Google’s 200 ranking factors, it is still something to consider.
Poor grammar and spelling give a negative user experience and this will affect your rankings, whether it be directly or indirectly. If you do decide to update your spelling and grammar, be sure to change the date to display the fresh content and promote it like you would a new article or page.
Improve The Accuracy Of Your Content
No matter how much it is contested, every Google update is centred around one thing and one thing only: improving the overall user experience. If your website is designed to create a great user experience, then you will see success with Google’s multiple algorithm changes and the constant updating and refining of their ranking factors. You can easily make your content more user-friendly and helpful by updating your website to create new content or provide information.
If you aren’t a news site, or if you don’t have an audience which is large enough to see a response from Google, then you can still implement the same strategies. As you create more valuable resources, you will likely see your rankings increase.
Refresh Your Whole Website
It’s proven that fresh sites rank better and, all things being equal, Google will give websites which update their content frequently higher priority.
This is why abandoned websites don’t rank as well after a few years, even for news pieces or articles which may otherwise be very helpful. If Google recognises that your website isn’t being frequently updated, then this will hurt the ranking of your website.
Refreshing your website content means that your website will get a ranking boost as Google will recognise that you have fresh content on your website. Google will interpret this, no matter if it is correct or not, given that all of the other articles on your site have a higher value and this will improve the ranking for everything that has ever been published on your website.
Remove Broken Links
One of the most frustrating parts of going through and amending old content is finding broken links. Often, the most helpful resources which you originally linked to are no longer available. Perhaps the website has been shut down, or the URL has changed. Either way, having broken links will affect your rankings on Google and this will then push you further down in the results page.
Thankfully, fixing broken links isn’t too difficult. There are many tools available which you can use online for free which will scan your site and you will get a notification of any links found, which you can then go in and repair. There is also a Google Chrome plugin which is free to use.
To repair a broken link, you will need to go to the original page which you linked to and see if there are any other ways where it might be published. This is the easiest way you can improve things. But, if the article is off the web, then you may need to take more drastic measures.
You should look to find a resource which matches in quality and instead, link to that. If you cannot find anything similar, then just remove the link altogether – it’s better to have no link than a broken or dead one. Either way, removing or fixing broken links, or even link building to other sites, will make your website more valuable in Google’s eye and help to increase your rankings.
Improve How Google Indexes Your Website
As you make changes and work on improving the old content which you have published on your website, you may start to see benefits across all of your content, rather than just on the articles which you have updated. This is because Google looks at your whole website to see your most recent updates. This is then used as a measure of how often Google will crawl your website.
By updating old content, you can encourage Google to crawl your website more frequently without the need to publish content more often. The more that Google crawls your website, the more likely your recent updates will show up in search results following publishing, which will then give you an advantage regarding your search engine rankings.
To Conclude
Refreshing your website doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. If you have a large amount of old content on your website, then by setting time aside each week to update it, you will start to see these changes reflected in your search ranking results.
If you find that there is just too much to update, or you don’t have time to do so, then you could always invest in the help of an SEO digital agency, who can help and assist with this. Refreshing your website content does have huge and positive impacts on your website rankings, so if you want to see a quick and long-lasting improvement in your website traffic and rankings, then refreshing and updating your website content is one of the first things you should do.
Natalie Wilson is a freelance writer for many different business publications. With a range of knowledge in the business sector, she is currently researching brand development and what makes brands unique, particularly looking into SEO Manchester agencies.