Why Re-Optimizing Content Should Be Part of Your SEO Strategy

What Is Content Re-Optimization

Content re-optimization is the process of going through the content on your website and updating or removing existing copy, images, videos, and alike to improve your site’s ranking on search engines. Making sure you’re publishing high-quality content will help your website’s relevance and will appear more trustworthy when reaching a larger audience.

This is all done by examining topic gaps, adding new visual content such as photos or infographics, videos, such as tutorials, and overall rewriting content to better match search intent.

So, now that you know what content re-optimization is, let’s take a deeper look at why it matters for SEO.

Recent Case Study on Re-optimizing Content

In a recent case study published by Moz, they calculated the impact content re-optimization had on the performance of a creative content marketing agency’s blog over a 10-month period from January 1 to October 31.

This case study consisted of 41 articles being reworked with each article containing a unique target keyword with the help of tools such as  Search Console and Ahrefs. Along with each article’s copy being optimized, they also updated the published date to reflect the new changes.

All the articles that were re-optimized had been indexed for at least three months, and after they were re-optimized, they examined the data both three months before and after the republish date to analyze the results.  They looked at data such as:

  • Clicks to the URL from the target keyword
  • All organic clicks to the URL
  • Total number of page-one keywords each URL ranks for
  • Target keyword position for the URL
  • Total organic impressions for the URL

Their Results

  • 46% of the articles republished were receiving more clicks to the URL with their target term.
  • 37% of the articles had more total clicks from keywords to re-optimized content, and 29% of the re-optimized content received more clicks after they were republished.
  • 9% of the re-optimized articles had more page-one keyword rankings after being republished.
  • 17% of the articles had a better average ranking position for targeted keywords after being re-optimized.
  • 100% of the articles generated more impressions after being republished

Why Does Re-Optimization Matter for SEO?

Re-optimizing content on your website is a great tactic to implement if your goal is to increase the overall traffic to your site, better keyword rankings, and potentially even more leads.

Topic comprehensiveness, in the use of matching search intent, will lead to more clicks, even if it means cutting the word count on your pages or blogs. You’ll want to aim your work toward your audience by adding or removing sections that aren’t relevant to your audience to refine it as much as possible.

One way you can approach re-optimization is by observing content on a competitor’s website, as this may help realize what might be missing on your own site and what can be added.

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About the Author

Sixth City Marketing

This post was written and edited by employees at Sixth City Marketing, a full-service SEO and digital marketing agency helping clients across all industries since 2010.

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