Update your content pieces to not loose any traffic | Ep. #7

Hi, my name is Phillip Stemann, and I’ll be learning you how to succeed with your website.

When you create content today, you put a lot of effort into it as it needs to be unique, but everyone else is doing the same. So it’s extremely important for you to stay updated on all your content pieces, not only a blog post, but also if you create e-books or courses or other types of content that ranks on Google, you need to stay updated. There are many ways to do this easily. You could weekly go through your blog posts and make sure that all of them are up to date.

But this is a very, very time-consuming task.

And I would say that it definitely depends on your industry, because some are in an industry that doesn’t develop as fast as others. So if you are in an industry where the development might not be so fast and you update your blog post every week, it might be a huge time waste for you unless it’s working for you, then, of course, keep on doing it. Otherwise, I would not recommend you doing it. 

However, if you are in an industry where it’s updated constantly, then you need to update your content as well, constantly.

And you do this by going through your blog posts. Very simple. The way I do it is whenever I create a piece of content, I make a reminder to myself. After three months I need to circle back and look at this piece of content. Is still relevant? Do I need to update it in any way? Is any of the data points I’m using outdated? Do I need to update it? It can be that I’m talking about a plugin that doesn’t exist any more.

Well, then I need to find a replacement plugin. Unless the whole article is about that plugin, then I should take the article down as this article can hurt my other articles. It can also be that I’m referring to a company that doesn’t exist any longer. Well, again, if the whole article is about this company, then the article needs to go down. If it’s just part of the article, then I should change that part where I talk about this company and find a more relevant company.

This is extremely important to do as a bad user. Experience results in visitors, not reading your blog post and when visitors go to your website, and they fast go out again because they don’t find it relevant, Google’s see’s this very bad. Another thing you can experience is for 404 errors, 404 errors basically means that you have links that goes to a page that doesn’t exist any longer. This is again extremely bad user experience and this will also affect your Google rankings.

The way you can come around this is by using a of course, you can do it manually, but you can also use a tool. There are a lot of free tools out there. So don’t worry. I personally use Rank Math, their 404 tool is great. You can manually run reports, but they will also report to you if they find a 404 link, and then you just need to replace it immediately. It’s so important. Furthermore, the last thing I want to talk about is content Decay.

Content decay basically means that your content is declining in traffic over the last 12 months. This means that let’s say you have written a fantastic blog post and it’s performing so well put all of a sudden it’s started to decline in visitors amount and the reason can be many.

But you should definitely check this blog post out. Why is it declining?

And often it’s because you’re using data points or similar things you’re talking about. It’s just not relevant any more. So people go to this blog post, and they read some, but then they found out that you didn’t use anything relevant for this article or for this moment. Maybe the whole industry has changed. So you need to be aware of this. And there are two ways you can do it. You can either do it manually or you can use a tool.

The manual way is completely free, but it’s not as optimised as the tool. The manual ways that you go to Google Analytics and you take a list of your pages and then you compare them the last six months to the six months prior to that, have they declined a lot in traffic or do you see other similarities? Then you should definitely check it out. And then, of course, after your changes, keep monitoring these blog posts. Are they still declining in traffic?

Then you need to circle back and look through it again. Otherwise, you have done a great job. The other part is using a tool. You can use a tool like ClickFlow. It’s a fantastic tool, especially for this. ClickFlow will basically keep an eye on all your blog posts. Of course, after you have updated the blog posts, they will still monitor it to make sure that your changes are doing what you want it to do, increase traffic again.

So that’s been it. I hope it’s been helpful for you. I would love some feedback if you have any. And I would love if you could write me a review, wherever you are listening to this podcast, I’m reading all reviews. And remember, consistency is key to success. Let’s catch up on the next one.