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How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

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How Contextualizing Topics can Lead to Press-worthy Content for Your Brand

The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

When someone regularly adds new content to their sites, they face an inevitable question: What happens to my older articles?

The way blogging works is really unfair to your past work: It gets buried in archives, losing traffic and relevance.

Is there a way to keep your content always up-to-date? Yes, but first let’s discuss the why.

Why update your content?

Keeping your content fresh and updated is more than overcoming the unfairness of your past work fading away. It’s actually a legit marketing tactic that saves money and makes your users’ on-site experience smoother.

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So let’s dive into why updating old content is so important:

1. User experience

The most obvious reason is that you want each of your site pages to be an effective entry landing page: Outdated content and broken links will likely result in bounces. These are lost leads and clients.

2. Search engine optimization

When it comes to SEO, content updates offer quite a few advantages:

  • Maintaining more consistent rankings, especially for those queries that deserve freshness. We’ve all seen this before: A competitor updates a page and suddenly gains 3-4 positions. It can be a temporary boost, but unless you perform an update to your page, it may last 12-18 months. Updating your old content on a regular basis will help you avoid these situations without necessarily chasing each particular loss.

  • Creating more helpful content (see what I did here?). What we knew about COVID three years ago has nothing to compare with what we know now. So, if you wrote an article on it back then, you will have a lot to add now. Adding new facts and guidelines to your old content makes it more in-depth — and yes, helpful — and that’s a ranking factor.

  • Making the most of your already-built link equity: Your old content may have attracted some backlinks and trust signals. You can benefit from those without investing in new links to your new articles.

  • Generating higher click-through thanks to a fresher date within your search snippet. I’m not aware of any organic search click-through study that would include dates in search snippets, but it’s safe to assume that in most cases, most people would be attracted to a fresher date, so if your search snippets include dates, it’s a good idea to make sure they’re pretty recent:

How to identify content that needs updating

So how to identify outdated content (also referred to as expired content or content decay)?

Here are a few methods:

Loss of rankings

If you’re monitoring your rankings, you will be notified of any loss.

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There may be multiple reasons for rankings decline, but for content-based pages, it’s often about content getting outdated. Evaluate your target SERP to see if a more up-to-date page is over-ranking yours now.

For new keywords you’re not tracking positions for, you can analyze the ranking fluctuations using SE Ranking. The tool offers a handy SERP analytics feature that visualizes organic search result dynamics over time. It’s a great way to analyze how versatile any SERP is and how often you may need to update your target page to keep up:

1663701316 239 How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

Loss of traffic

For multi-page, content-heavy sites, it may be next to impossible to keep track of all the rankings. Therefore regular page-level traffic audits will help you catch a possibly outdated article.

Google Analytics is a pretty solid way to identify pages that have seen a decline in the loss of clicks from organic search. All you need is to limit your Acquisition channels to “Organic search”, click through to the “Landing Pages” tab, and use the “Compare” checkbox when selecting dates.

You can compare clicks to the same period of the previous month, or go further back, depending on how often you do that exercise:

1663701317 530 How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

Make sure to select the same days of the week when comparing, as the traffic over the weekends will likely be always lower. You can also compare month- to-month to catch more extended losses.

Once you know which settings work best for your site, you can save that report to save yourself trouble of clicking all those settings again.

You can also use Search Console to identify pages losing traffic. There’s an option to compare clicks using various time frames, but you can only go as far as 16 months back:

1663701317 531 How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

Search Console lets you sort your pages by those that lost the most clicks, which is a great way to identify your biggest losses:

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Clicking any page in the chart will load a new report focusing on that page. This is when you can click to the “Queries” tab to find the actual keywords that are sending fewer clicks.

It’s also a good idea to set monitoring of your key competing pages, in order to be notified when those are updated. Visual Ping is a great tool for this, allowing you to monitor your competitors’ on-page SEO efforts and be alerted when they change anything on their sites:

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In my niche, for example, I use the tool to monitor Wikipedia and Google pages to be alerted when there’s a change there. While I may not be able to ever compete with either, it’s a good way to know when there’s an update needed for my pages on the same topic.

Link equity

You probably know your most-linked-to pages (if not, you may find them using Link Explorer):

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The logic here is that if a page is heavily (and naturally) linked but has no organic traffic, you’re probably facing one of two issues:

In both of these cases, updating and re-optimizing a page could help it gain some rankings and clicks.

Likewise, if you see links pointing to an article of yours steadily disappearing, that may mean that your content has gone very outdated and the editors have started removing the links. Linkchecker is an easy backlink monitoring tool that will help you catch that unfortunate trend in a timely manner.

How to update your old content

Simply republish to a new date (Spoiler: Not recommended)

A popular way to ensure your search snippet has a recent date is to simply republish it to a new date.

Well, according to Google, this is wrong:

“…it’s against our guidelines to artificially freshen a story when the publisher didn’t add significant information or demonstrated a compelling reason…”

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It should be noted that it does help. While I cannot recommend anything that goes against Google’s guidelines, it’s really frustrating to try and explain it to clients, especially when their competitors repeatedly and successfully use this simple tactic.

Nonetheless, let’s take this method off the table.

Add “significant” information

Unfortunately, Google wouldn’t tell what amount of information could be considered “significant.”

So you will have to use your editorial judgment. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

  • Include fresh stats or more recent numbers.

  • Update your sources (and replace broken links). Linking to articles that go back years ago will tell Google (and your site users) that yours is quite outdated as well.

  • Update your screenshots / images and embed newer videos.

  • Add new tools, mention new trends or recent events that may have influenced what is described in the article.

  • Add internal links to your newer content.

  • Add your new CTAs, link to your new (and relevant) lead magnets, update the forms

  • Optimize your page better, and in a more natural way: WebCEO offers a cool tool allowing you to identify which keywords any page can be re-optimized for higher organic visibility.

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While it’s not the only tool I tend to use, this one helps define the direction.

Next, I run my target keyword through Text Optimizer to find more angles, concepts and entities that can be used to expand my content and make it more relevant and in-depth:

1663701320 560 How to Identify and Refresh Outdated Content

Now, republish it to a new date to push it up on top of your site’s archives. There’s also a way to display the last updated date, without republishing (there are similar solutions on WP alternatives as well). However, that way it will remain deeper in your archives. If you update content often and don’t want all of those updates to appear on the front page, this is a good alternative method.

Redirect to a new page

This makes sense only if you have a few old articles on the same topic and you’re consolidating them into a single new one.

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Another valid reason for redirecting is when you have dates in URLs.

In other cases, I’m not a fan of internal redirects if you can do without them, so I’d almost always try to keep existing URLs.

Make content updates part of your routine

For well-established, content-heavy sites, updating content should be part of your content marketing routine. In other words, it should happen on a consistent and regular basis. To make it happen, try one or a combination of the following tactics:

  • Depending on your new and old content volume, make sure a certain percentage of content being published on your site is an update. For example, for every five new articles on your site, one should be an update.

  • Treat article updates as new content. Many reputable blogs (like this one) pay staff writers the same amount of money for an updated article as for a new one.

  • Allocate time every month to analyzing rankings and traffic losses and see if there’s an update opportunity there. I recommend assessing your declining organic visibility at least once a month.

  • Depending on your new content frequency, define one day in your editorial calendar to article updates. For example, if you update your blog daily, allocate every Friday to an article update.

  • Make sure your updated content is promoted as new: Create social media updates to push it using all available channels and diverse messaging. I use Creatopy for that because it makes this process extremely productive by allowing content writers and promoters to collaborate on visual creatives.

It should be noted that updating your site is not just about SEO and clicks. Many of your static pages that are not necessarily created to attract organic traffic are often left outdated. These include About us page, TOS, privacy policy page, FAQ page, and more. Keep those updated as well, based on your company’s milestones and legislation changes.

Takeaways

Keeping your existing content updated helps your user experience and SEO by letting you benefit from the past effort and already acquired link equity. Fresher content likely attracts higher click-through thanks to dated search snippets.

To identify content that needs updating, assess your losses in rankings and traffic. It’s also a good idea to update well-linked content that has never ranked, for any reason.

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Republishing an old article to a new date without updating it’s against Google’s guidelines. Adding significant information – like new sources, tools, stats, images and videos — lets you republish old articles and push them on top of your archives, increasing their chances to rank higher and attract more clicks.

And finally, to make sure your content updates are really effective, make them part of your content marketing routine.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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