To some extent, every modern business relies on its online presence. This is where new customers can discover your company or otherwise get in touch using the company website or official social media accounts.
Many of these businesses post online to broaden their online presence, but that content can lose relevance over time. When that happens, there are ways to revitalise your company’s online presence.
Identifying Evergreen Content
Most articles posted online can fall into one of two categories – time sensitive or evergreen content. It’s natural for content posted online to experience a lot of interest from its audience before slowly becoming irrelevant, which also undermines its search performance. As a rule, Google tries to deliver timely, more recent results for most search queries.
Meanwhile, evergreen content can stand the test of time. The best examples of this are found in e-commerce or digital services like iGaming. These businesses publish hub pages that get repeated interest, because it’s the location of a popular store or a casino game. So, when users search for online roulette at Paddy’s, they’ll find the same page offering multiple lobbies filled with interactive roulette live streams. Pages like this stay relevant for a very long time, for as long as users are engaging with the product/service being offered.
However, the dichotomy between time sensitive and evergreen content is often misleading. Articles posted on blogs canbe evergreen, especially when they cover topics that never go out of style. So, when a company writes articles about its industry, those posts might slip into irrelevancy when they don’t need to. This is content decay, something that is explained in more detail here at Search Engine Journal. Thankfully, there are ways to refresh older content so that it can continue performing well into the future.
Reviving Irrelevant Content
As widely reported, content decay isn’t necessarily an indictment of the content itself. Interest dwindles over time and, all else being equal, Google would rather recommend a 2024 article about a topic over a 2017 article.
There are many ways to revive irrelevant content, all related to how Google’s algorithms view the page. Before trying them, every site owners’ first step should be to perform a content audit and repeat the audit at the very least once per year. SEO marketers like HubSpot publish guide pages to help online entrepreneurs keep their sites healthy. A content audit will help you identify pages in need of assistance.
Once you have a page in your sights, you can refine them. That’s one of the great advantages of publishing online – the ability to republish your pages. This means you can update info that has become outdated over time, or apply some modern technical magic to the older page.
Doing this, and re-indexing the page with Google, can breathe new life into the page. This also presents an opportunity to act on reader feedback, if available, and attach more trendy visual media to the page like images, videos and more up-to-date social media embeds. Likewise, fixing broken links and applying modern optimisation strategies will give the page a boost with Google’s algorithms when it gets republished.
Once republished, the page gets a shiny new date that overtakes the last one. This also helps with the algorithm, but you must do the legwork of actually changing and updating the content of the page.
By following this basic outline, you’ll be able to revive most pages. Not all pages deserve reviving, of course, but giving evergreen pages a second chance can be of great benefit to every online entrepreneur currently struggling with content decay.