In my experience even small updates on evergreen content can result in a 50-75% increase in traffic.
But if you’ve got hundreds of posts on your website, how do you know which ones to update? After all, you can’t go back and update hundreds of posts. If you try, you’ll never have time to create new content.
Instead, look for these 3.5 types of content on your site to update regularly:
1: Posts with the most traffic
If you have an article that’s getting 10,000 searches a month, then even a small drop in traffic can be disastrous.
To prevent this from happening, refresh your old content and keep it up to date for a good user experience.
Use Google Analytics, SEO tools or Google Search Console to find the posts with the most traffic.
2: Posts with the most impressions
These are the posts with high impressions but relatively low search rankings.
To find these, open Google Search Console and click on “Performance” in the navigation column on the left-hand side of the page.
You’ll see a list of your articles by the number of impressions and volume of clicks.
Or use SEO tools such Ahrefs to get this information.
Ideally you want to find posts with high impressions that rank on the second page of Google. Update these articles once or twice per year.
3: Posts with the most backlinks
These articles have the most authority in Google, which means you can get them to rank better and faster than lower authority content.
You might even be able to rank for new keywords, attract more backlinks and improve your site’s overall authority when you update these.
Use an SEO tool to track which posts have the most backlinks.
3.5 High conversion content
Maybe you’ve got a page that gets just 200 hits a month but it converts at 5% on a $500 product. That’s $5,000. Only a small number of people search for this topic but it still brings in a lot of money.
If you can increase the traffic on high converting content, you can also increase your bottom line.
These pages might be lead generation posts, high commission affiliate posts or buyer intent keywords and topics such as insurance or investing.
If one of these pages becomes out of date, both traffic and conversions can be affected. These are pages you should probably update first before anything else.
And if you don’t yet have money generating pages such as these, perhaps it’s time you added a few to your site.