How to revive the content if it has lost its relevance

Everything should be updated once: mailbox, wardrobe, hairstyle and music collection. Unfortunately, content is no exception. Each article is similar to a loaf of bread, which has the property of stale. Maybe not as fast as bread, but still. Update content takes less time and effort than creating a new one, so do not be lazy and get down to business! How exactly to "revive" the content you will learn from our tips.

Why update the content?
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Reason 1. Many people think that you should not do this, since old articles are buried in the depths of your blog and no one will see them. But this is an erroneous opinion, because your old articles will also be displayed in the search and provide irrelevant information. And the one who once found you outdated information is unlikely to come again.
Reason 2. Not every reader who is now familiar with your blog read it a month or a year ago. Yes, and if read, then not the fact that each published article. Updating the content, you give it a second wind, and your readers "new" useful and relevant information.

What kind of articles need to be updated?

1) Determine the least readable publications.
This will help you analyst blog. Note the following:

• Inbound Links - are the main metric that reflects the popularity of articles. This links from any site to your own site. They serve to optimize sites for search engines and receive referral traffic.
• Traffic. Track with the help of analytics, which articles bring you little traffic.

• Sharing in social networks. The high performance of the article is reflected in how often it is shared on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter, etc.

The easiest way to find out how many times your article was shared on social networks - using the universal tool for tracking links to web pages in different social networks Shared Count . This service works immediately with seven popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Delicious and StumbleUpon. All you need to do is enter the link of the record, news, articles, and then the program will show you the number of rassharivaniya, likes and comments in social networks. Thus find articles that are divided less frequently.



2) Determine the relevance of the content.
In addition to metrics, you need to track the relevance and relevance of the content. For example, users of your site recently began to ask questions about the segmentation of subscribers, and you have previously written a detailed article on this topic, which is somewhere in the depths of your blog. Instead of writing a new article on this topic, which Google can define as duplicate content, just update the written article and give it some color.

Ways and tips to revive the content

1. Use the old entry with the original URL. We advise you to keep the old URL so that Google does not consider your updated article as duplicate content. To do this, take your old record, update its contents and save.

2. If you change the name, save at least keywords. Keywords should be left unchanged in order to appear higher in the search results and get visitors by keywords. Try to not change the name of the article radically; it’s better to leave a similarity with the original.



3. Editor's note. If you updated the article, but there are long-time user comments to it, we suggest the editor leave a small note under the updated post to clarify the situation. Here is what you can add at the end of the reprinted content:



4. Accuracy of content. Over time, some parts of the article become obsolete and lose their relevance. For example, long-standing statistics, examples, new product information, past events, etc. How to fix this situation? Read your article again and find what is outdated. First of all, remove the parts that are no longer relevant and add new headers to the parts that need to be slightly modified and supplemented.

Follow these tips to update your content:

• Delete irrelevant content
• Update obsolete blog entry
• Replace obsolete data and examples with more recent and relevant.
• Update screenshots if necessary. This is especially important for walkthroughs.
• Add modern success stories and case studies
• Check and replace internal links (especially if there are currently resources where the information you need is better)
• Update CTA. After you update the article, analyze whether the existing call to action is appropriate for the modified content.

5. Optimize the meta description. Meta description does not affect the ranking of your content, but it can affect the clickthrough rate in the search. Make sure that your meta description accurately reflects what is said in the article and is tempting enough to follow the link from the search.

6. Publish updated content! After you have done all the previous steps to update an outdated article, it's time to publish and give it a second life. And now is the time to think about how else you can inform readers about the "new" article. Effective tools are email and push notifications.
Send push notifications immediately after the article is published. They come instantly to the user's desktop, even if the browser is turned off.



Email can be sent as a digest of articles for the week or a separate letter with the announcement of one article as does HubSpot :



7. Statistics. In order to determine how effective and useful for readers is the new content, track the statistics of the main elements of the article before and after publication:

• Title of the article (in case it was changed);
• URL
• Number of comments before and after
• Number of views a month before the publication of updated content and a month after
• Number of shares in social networks
• Acquired new readers and leads a month before the publication of updated content and a month after

Do you run your blog and know other secrets of content update? Share them with us and other readers in the comments.