Is Updating Old Content For SEO Worth It?
After my Amazon associate account got shut down for the third time a few years ago, I decided to move on and started focusing on other businesses rather than just focusing on Affiliate Marketing.
As a result, I stopped working on my surviving Amazon affiliate sites and just left them as is even though I managed to start getting paid from Amazon again.
This changed in 2019 when I decided to consolidate three sites into one to save domain/hosting costs. One of the sites got a facelift and on-page elements optimization (Title, H1, Meta description, etc) based on a new round of keyword research to better align each piece of content with a keyword. My team and I started working on this in January 2019 and completed updating the site in March 2019. Content from the other two sites was transferred to this revamped site at the end of January 2019. One thing to note is that we did not optimize the content from the other two sites.
The Effects of Updating Old Content for SEO
Looking at the GSC data (first image below), it’s interesting to see it took a really long time (at least a few months) to really see any changes in impressions and clicks. A big happy surprise came in the later part of 2019. The increase was in line with the historical data, as the site traffic would increase substantially near and during the holiday season (late Oct-Dec). However, this did not happen in 2018. I stopped working on the site in 2017 so there were no updates done AT ALL to the site in 2018.
So the fact that this substantial increase in traffic occurred in 2019 and did not occur in 2018, made a piece of evidence that updating old content does help SEO.
The impressions and clicks trend for Jan-Mar is also mirroring the old pattern, in which it declined in January and starts to stabilize in February. The fact that impressions, clicks, and traffic are not declining back to the previous low before the optimization (early 2019 level), this is another piece of evidence that now the site is in better shape than before I stopped working on it completely.
One thing to note is that the backlink profile was pretty stable in 2018 – 2019 and started to decline in early 2020 (third image below). Not sure if this is affecting impressions/clicks in early 2020 because coronavirus incident is likely affecting the impressions/clicks as well.
Impressions and Clicks
Site Traffic
Backlink Profile
My Plan – Updating More Old Content for SEO
My immediate plan for this site is to update and optimize the remaining content. As I mentioned, there is a lot of un-optimized content from the two other sites that were consolidated into this one, so I believe optimizing these old content could boost the traffic further.
I am also planning to build some backlinks to this site as well. I will be using ScrapeBox and other SEO tools that are hosted on a VPS using remote desk access.
What is your experience with updating old content? Have you seen a substantial increase in SEO traffic? I would love to hear about your experience! Please leave a comment below.
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I build websites and use them for testing various SEO strategies and tactics.
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- How To Track Keyword Ranking? - April 27, 2020
- Is Updating Old Content For SEO Worth It? - March 30, 2020
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If you want to boost your SEO, look no further than updating your old content. This is the perfect way to increase the traffic your website gets from search engines, and it’s guaranteed to make a huge improvement in how well your content ranks. After you’ve updated the content, it’s time to share it again.
To increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts & boost your search engine traffic, you can just update your old content & give yourself an improved freshness score. When you tell “Google” your content is new, you’ll get a spike in traffic that will make the tiny amount of work required well worth it.