Why revisiting your content is a good idea
The world moves faster and faster with each passing year. What was relevant one year might be out of date the next. Let’s take a look at why revisiting your content is so important and how this is best achieved.
The world moves faster and faster with each passing year. What was relevant one year might be out of date the next – sometimes much quicker than that. And yet it is not quite so simple.
There are many, many examples of high quality articles that can be easily tweaked to ensure that they remain vital, relevant and useful to your readership and by proxy to those pesky Google algorithms. There’s a great quote from ShoutMeLoud.com that states…
“Aged [content] is like aged wine! It becomes more satisfying, more refreshing, more valuable, more appreciated and more sticky!”
Every company has pages on their website that drive more traffic than others and it is the content on such pages that must be kept as vital as possible in order to sustain and build on the successes of the past.
For pages with peer reviews of products or services then it is vital that these pages reflect recent user experiences and also review your latest products or services as this will be most likely what visitors will be looking for. When it comes to general content you should give it a regular overhaul to ensure that it is current. Let’s take a look at why revisiting your content is so important and how this is best achieved.
The why
When visitors arrive on the desired page on your site they will do one of two things. They will either take a quick look at what they have found and decide it is worth reading or investigating, or they will make a quick judgement and leave. The latter, when replicated becomes what is known as a ‘high bounce rate.’ This is far, far more likely to occur when pages including blogs are filled with outdated references and content that is not updated.
Blogs and websites are like rare orchids. They need regular care and attention so they don’t begin to lose their lustre, their attraction and subsequently their admiring looks and visitors. By keeping your content updated and fresh you reduce the risk of decay and increase the potential to turn visitors into repeat visitors and subscribers and hopefully valued customers.
The how
Creating content is extremely time consuming and not every little error is caught, even by the most eagle-eyed proof reader. So, the first important thing to remember is to check your content for typos, grammatical errors and repeated words. Next, you can look at your images or lack thereof in your articles. Images can date faster than words and yet a picture can speak a thousand words.
It is therefore vital to check your old images and update them where relevant, while using the exercise to add more images to bland content, helping it to shine. You should then look at references and update them to more current material where possible, while amending dates and anything else that can keep your content rooted in the past.
Finally, should you have made the mistake in the past of allowing comments on your posts and not properly protecting them from spam and bots then you should set about doing so, ensuring that any comments left on your site are a) relevant and b) have been satisfactorily answered. In addition to all of this you should add any more current thoughts to your content to give it a bit of a more current feel.