Stale content is a problem that many content creators struggle with. It is a big problem for a business because it can cause visitors to lose interest very quickly. To further illustrate, let’s start with a scenario. Imagine yourself achieving top rankings on Google and other search engines and getting thousands of hits a day on your website. After a few short months, your website traffic, Google rankings, and new customer count begin to taper off. You are no longer achieving top rankings on Google. In fact, you may not even find your website on the front page of search results at all.
Does this sound familiar? If your answer to this question is “yes”, you have become a victim of stale content. Much like a piece of fruit or a jug of milk, content can become stale over time. Search engines, as well as visitors to your website, have an insatiable thirst for fresh content. If you don’t update your content every so often, customers will quickly lose interest in your website, and your search engine rankings will suffer as a result.
That is what the C in CVS is all about – consistency. CVS is an acronym that embodies the three biggest traits people expect from a business. A business should be consistent, it should be valuable, and it should be serviceable. If you’re constantly allowing your content to become stale, you’re not being consistent enough.
These traits should not be taken into account just for your website either; a company needs to be consistent, valuable, and serviceable in everything it does. That is a big part of what makes a business successful.
What Can I Do About Stale Content?
Hold on before you throw your old articles away. There is a way to keep your content fresh without having to rewrite your entire copy from scratch. This process is called historical optimization. Think of historical optimization like this: Imagine restoring an old classic car with new paint, a new set of wheels, and maybe a new engine as well. Even though it’s an old car by all rights and purposes, it has been restored with new parts to make the car look and work as though it were brand new, and just as restorations can give your car new life, historical optimization can give your content new life as well.
How Can I Use Historical Optimization to Renew My Content?
There are many creative ways to use historical optimization to your advantage. Here are a few steps you can take.
- Scrutinize your content – By scrutinizing your content, you can get at least a basic idea of where improvement is most sorely needed. Gather each of your articles that are doing poorly, and place them side by side with their statistics. Pay special attention to click-through ratios, conversion rates, bounce rates, and amounts of organic traffic. Take a look at trends for different keywords. See which keywords are getting higher traffic than the ones you’re currently using, and take a look at what the top leaders for those keywords are doing with them. This can help bring inspiration.
- See what other industry leaders are doing – Part of having a business is being humble enough to realize that there is always a reason current industry leaders have become what they are. Sometimes you can learn from their examples and even inspire yourself with entirely new ideas that these leaders haven’t tried yet. This is a good way to catapult yourself back into top rankings quickly. Businesses have been competing like this for many years.
- Use your own creativity – Don’t be afraid to implement some of your own ideas to help refresh your content as well. Some of the best ideas have come at a spur of the moment. In fact, this is how content marketing got started in the first place. When John F. Oppedahl coined the phrase in 1996 at a conference of the American Society for Newspaper Editors, he did not expect that people would be writing articles to advertise businesses online!
- Implement changes slowly at first – When making changes to your articles, the less data you have to track, the easier it will be for you to identify which changes create the largest results. Therefore, it’s quite a lot easier to make changes to one or two articles at a time and track only the data sets for the articles you changed.
- Assess and reassess performance – When you finish your audit, keep track of any changes in statistics. The result of your changes likely won’t be spotted immediately, so it helps to assess your statistics over a longer period of time, say after a one-month period, then reassess any changes the next month. If you see increases in statistics over the two-month period, go ahead and apply your changes to the rest of your articles, as you have likely addressed the problem.
Sometimes it Pays to Hire Professional Help
If all else fails, and you cannot figure out a way to regain your previous ranking yourself, it sometimes helps to have a professional assess your situation. This is where Nova Advertising comes in. We have many years of experience in many different types of marketing. Our professional staff will be able to get your website back on the correct path so that you can regain your high search engine rankings.