Rewrite your content on a regular basis

bigredseo

HD Community Advisor
Staff member
Just a heads up to those that have not updated their website in a few weeks/months/years - it's important to rewrite your content regularly.

New things happen all the time in the industry. Tools that were once great are no longer the "top dog," and that content should be updated to show a better process.

We recently rewrote content regarding Google's Disavow Tool, a tool that allows you to submit links for Google to ignore when it comes to SEO. These days, the tool is not really used much and shouldn't be used by those that don't understand all its nuances.

Anyway, we rewrote the article, which was last modified in September 2021. It had 1,145 words in the article.
We published the updated version on Feb 18, 2023 (about 30 days ago). The new article has 2,285 words, an increase of 1,140 words.

We went from having 59 different phrases actively queried in the last 18 months to now 129 different queries in the past 30 days.
Clicks etc increasing was normal given that it was "new" content that people wouldn't have seen, but the number of queries increasing and being searched (verified via Google Search Console) was exactly what we were looking for.

To really bring this into perspective. Our old piece of content had 1530 impressions in the past 18 months. The new content has had 3300 impressions in the last 30 days!

So, let that be a little incentive for you to rewrite some of your older content. Add some new things that have happened, remove some of the old junk that no longer belongs, and remove some of the fluff you likely added years ago that really doesn't need to be there. It doesn't have to result in longer content; better content is worth the effort!
 
I have to agree with this.
I recently helped out a friend with their site.
The first thing I did was remove typos, grammatical errors, and generally tidied up the language and that alone increased the incoming traffic.
I guess that's because google noticed the update.
 
So it's April 2nd, and it really hasn't been that long since my last post, but I figured I'd share the latest info with this particular post.

As of today, the 3-month total Impressions are 9,843, with nearly 8,500 happening in the last 30 days and 179 different queries.

I think it's time to re-write another article :)
 
It's May 2nd, another month has passed. The new content has now been online for 2.5 months (Feb 18th - May 2nd) and once again, more improvements.

Since the launch of the new content, impressions are now at 23,163 and the 30-day number is now at 13,558.

Also, the number of different keyword queries that the content now ranks for is 204 (according to Search Engine Console).

Just figured I'd give an update to the thread.
 
Just a reminder, these are "impressions" and not "clicks" or "visits". An impression is how many times our article/page was suggested to users in search results to click on. Depending on the article, our target is usually around 10% that click through to read the article.

But, if you can't be found, you'll never get clicked :) So Impressions are a great measurement tool, as long as there's then clicks, and then of course conversions (whatever you are defining as a conversion).

As for what type of site, this is a business site (SEO), listed in my signature.
 
Interesting information. I'm in the process of updating our website right now and also starting up some new websites. It's good to get some encouragement that the work does indeed pay off :). With chatGPT coming on the scene I've been wondering whether seo is worth all the effort anymore, but glad to hear that even just updating info has a significant impact.
 
With chatGPT coming on the scene I've been wondering whether seo is worth all the effort anymore
Still worth the effort, but be careful with ChatGPT and other AI software - they CAN be detected, and they CAN impact your site (good and bad).

We're currently working a client that has been using ChatGPT since November 2022 and they've been hit pretty hard with a rankings drop. The only thing that they say they've done is content using ChatGPT - we're still digging into it, but if that's the only thing they really did, and got hit with a penalty of sorts, then that's bad news for a lot of people out there!
 
I have used Hypotenuse to write some content and it works extremely well. It is honestly very difficult for me to differentiate it from human written content. While not perfect, it does have some flaws, I think for what it is, it can be a very useful tool to speed up the writing process and lift some of the burden off of your self.
 
Informative, and totally agreed with what you said. As the industry is changing, the algorithms and trends are also changing accordingly and with these changes if we do not update our work and content, its relevance will gradually go down.
I liked how you explained it and would surely love to read more of your informative content :)
 
Very informative and this is need of the time as google is focusing on useful content for the visitor so everyone need to update content inshort add more and related content to get serp position.
 
As the market evolves, so do the algorithms and trends, and if we fail to improve our content in response, its relevancy will decrease over time.
Just updating info has a significant impact on ranking.
 
So it's been several months since I've updated this thread, and it's been 5 months since we updated the content on the site. How do things fair today?

GSC Impressions
Since the launch of new content: 74,000
Last 3 months: 47,800
last 28 days: 19,400

In the last month, we're averaging about 900 impressions PER DAY. Our old content did 1530 in 18 months!

Number of keywords: 306

Those numbers are drastically different from what our old content was doing before the rewrite in February 2023. You can view those details and numbers in the first post of this thread.

Are more people searching for "Google Disavow Tool" than in past years? Not really. On average, "google disavow tool" is searched 600 times per month, and it's been at that level since July 2020. Prior to July 2020 monthly search volume routinely swung into the 1,000+ searches a month. So it's not a highly searched term (directly), but keep in mind, with a rewrite, we're ranking for many more related terms than we had previously.
 
Ok people, it's that time again.. November 2023 and it's time for another update to what are the numbers.

Keep in mind, we have not touched this article since it was rewritten in Februrary 2023 (nearly 9 months ago). There's been nothing added or removed, it's just cycling through traffic and keywords on it's own.

GSC Impressions
Since the launch of new content: 142,580
Last 3 months: 70,503
last 28 days: 16,946

Number of keywords: 368

The top phrase driving traffic for most of October was "google disavow tool" which on average gets 800 searches per month globally, and for most of October we floated in around position 25 in Google results. Not bad for a page that has ZERO links pointing to it :)

Who were we up against? Moz, SEMRush, BigCommerce, Neil Patel, Search Engine Land, Hubspot... and then there's us. That's not bad company to keep :)

If you're bored and want to find the article, search for "bigredseo google disavow tool" and you'll find us in Google. I recommend searching this way so that you don't inadvertently inflate other rankings.

But there ya go - another exciting installment and a friendly reminder to REWRITE YOUR CONTENT! Since doing this with the article, we've been busy rewriting new content for other articles and they too are paying off both in traffic and helping boost the overall rankings of the site.
 
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