When it comes to improving your site’s visibility, it’s not all about creating fresh content. You can, in fact, work with your pre-existing content and tweak it intelligently in order to get your site up the rankings. Search engines will always value content that answers searchers’ questions, but this does not mean that this has always to be fresh.
Content specialisation
Content specialisation is a great way for sites to improve their site rankings without creating new content. It involves focusing your site on key topics rather than making your site all things to all people. Sites that are concentrated on one topic perform better in search than the type of sites that are repositories for information on virtually any topic. To combat this, sites which offer everything under one roof have taken to domain splitting, dividing themselves up into several different sites which contain specific, singular topics of information.
The site DotDash.com is a great example. It split into separate domains, all of which included specialised content, i.e. focused, specific information. Their search results for each of their new sites was much better than that of their original site. There is a downside to domain splitting. The marketing and branding that went into your original site must be rethinking again.
Update your content
To be clear, updating your content is not the same thing as creating new content. Updating is about tweaking and improving what you already have onsite and this can be incredibly effective when it comes to improving your ranking. This sounds fairly obvious, right? The world is moving fast and so are the people in it, they want all forms of media that they come into contact with to appear fresh and new and to update in real time to reflect a changing world.
You’d be surprised how often sites don’t update their content. The way that sites work is that they tend to outsource to content writers who are tasked with providing them with fresh news articles and stories. Writers aren’t really tasked with updating and tweaking the pre-existing content on websites. Seeing an immediate ranking boost through updating your content is not difficult. Even by just extending the length of onsite glossaries can see an increase in your ranking.
Delete content
Deleting pages can be just what you need to see improvements in your search fortunes. By deleting pages that are underperforming, Google has more time to focus on crawling and evaluating your better content and can make a more accurate decision as to whether or not to give it a higher ranking, leading to a search performance boost.
In order to decide which content to delete, go back and look at the pages that have received the lowest amounts of traffic in the last 18 months. When you delete pages, remember to include redirects to other pages if they have important backlinks in them. Like, in many avenues of marketing, it is always better to work with what you’ve got rather than try and acquire completely new products, customers or in this case web content. You can make a huge improvement to your search ranking by deleting, tweaking and streamlining the content that you already have.
