How Often Should Content Be Updated?

0:00All right. In this episode, we're going to talk about one of the biggest things that would drive you more SEO traffic that is not necessarily the sexiest thing, but it's around updating your content. and more specifically, how often you should update your content. So Neil, do you want to kick it off talking about why people should even think about it and what type of results you've gotten and how often you're doing it? Because you have a lot of data here. Yeah, sure. So if you ever do a Google search, what you'll find is more likely than less, you'll typically see Wikipedia on the first page. And the reason you see Wikipedia on the first page, it's not because it's the end-all be-all resource on a specific topic.

0:34A lot of times they do have amazing content. but what wikipedia does extremely well is their content is continually fresh and updated so just ask yourself a question if you ever do a search on google would you rather see a five-year-old result or a one-year-old result or a result that's from two weeks ago you typically want to see the two-week-old result because it's going to be more up-to-date and what we've shifted to is we used to blog team and i at one point during our peak 10 plus blog posts a day right that's a ton of content on digital marketing. It's now shifted to, I'll write a blog post once a week.

1:08So you're talking about four to five blog posts a month, depending on how many weeks in that particular month. But on the flip side, my team will update three to like six or seven blog posts a day, at least on the weekdays. And that's a lot of content to be updated. So why did we shift the strategy from continually pushing out new content to focus on updating our existing content? What we found is by updating our existing content, we generated more and more traffic. And to give you an idea, writing new content was great, but we really saw uptick in traffic and rankings by just updating. It was more efficient, higher ROI.

1:47And when we're focusing on just new content, what we're finding is a new content would get traffic, but the old content was starting to lose traffic. And we made the shift into just realizing that, hey, we need a team dedicated to just updating old pieces of content. So we found there's not an exact number of how often you should update it. We tried everything from, do we update it once a year to twice a year to once a quarter? And we went to the extreme and some pieces of content, we didn't update just monthly. Some of it we updated a weekly. And what we found the ideal amount to update our content is actually based on Google search console.

2:22So you log into Google search console and you can compare your articles from or your traffic by page current month over the last three months or current month over the same time period over a year ago. And we do both of those to figure out are articles decreasing or increasing in traffic. The ones that are decreasing, whether it's over a three month period or a one year period, it doesn't matter. Like if it's showing that over year over year, we had growth, but in the last three months, that article had a decline because from a year ago, let's say you were article a year ago, and then six months later, that article like quadruples in traffic.

3:00And then three months after that, it increases by another double. And then fast forward to today, it goes down by like 20%. When you compare from a year ago, you're still up in traffic, but compared to three months ago, you're down. And what we do is we'll look at both time ranges. And we look at whatever is going down in either time range, we start adjusting it and updating it. And that's the real metric we use to figure out what content to update because some just don't need updating as often. And that's allowed us to grow our traffic much more and collect the right type of leads. Yeah. Let me show you something right now with Forbes.

3:36So most people don't know this, but Forbes is more or less an affiliate website. And so this is an HRF screenshot, those of you that can see on YouTube. And you can see in like 2021 or so, So they're publishing in the light blue. That means it's new content. And the dark blue, that means it's been republished. So you can see in 2021, they published 22 ,000 new pages. And then you can see we're going into 2023. It's like, okay, they're publishing a lot less. It's not 22 ,000. It's not 10 ,000. It's maybe 3 ,700 new articles per month. But now they've increased the velocity of how often they update, which is the dark blue, which is 543.

4:15And so they're spending a lot more time updating now than they are creating new content. They're still creating a lot of new content. Don't get me wrong because they're a publisher first and foremost, but they're leveraging the power of their domain authority. And that's what they do because they know they understand which pages actually make money for them. And they understand that the game is to spend more time updating. And so HubSpot, from my understanding, this was maybe a couple of years ago when I talked to Matthew Barbie, who was there at the time as their VP of marketing. and they hire a lot of people just to focus on updating.

4:47These are full-time salaries just to focus on updating, right? I think this is going to get more and more intense and that's why I've been thinking about bringing back our content decay tool from ClickFlow so people can focus more on updating because it's about tending your garden, not necessarily tending to your garden, not necessarily planting new vegetables all the time. Yeah, look, updating is the best thing. If you use a strategy I'm talking about, I think you can do exceptionally well. It's just something for some reason a lot of people don't focus on. And if they did focus on it, they would get more traffic.

5:18It's not always about just creating new content, figure out how to update your existing content. And I don't know why people have that mentality of like, oh, I just got to keep writing new content. And I'm like, I don't think you really need to continue writing new content. All right. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Five stars, please. And we'll see you tomorrow.