Content is never a “set it and forget it” endeavor. Content is an ever-evolving asset, and to maintain or improve its value, you must keep it relevant, accurate and aligned with your audience’s needs.
Refreshing your website’s content will have two benefits. First, as mentioned, it will keep the latest infor-mation in front of your visitors. Second, refreshing a website’s content may assist, indirectly, with your company’s ranking on the search engine’s results page.
The Concept of Content Freshness and SEO
There is a myth in the digital marketing industry that “refresh-ing” content will improve rankings. Because of this myth, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies will do one or a couple of “SEO hacks” on your website.
One of these hacks—the most often used hack I’ve heard of—is when the company you hire for your SEO work goes through your website and updates the publish date on your web page. In this scenario, no new information is added to a website; it’s just a new date on the page file.
This will not help your website visitors or your SEO ranking! It’s a total scam.
The second hack that I’ve become aware of is when a com-pany claiming to be an SEO agency will rewrite the content on a website page using the same words that are already on the page. Again, no new information is added or any old information re-moved. Think of this as rearranging the furniture in your living room. It’s all the same stuff, just put in a different place.
This will not help your website visitors, who should be your primary focus with any content you put on your site.
Where Did This Myth Start?
In November 2011, Google updated its algorithm to evaluate the “freshness” of content. This part of the myth is true: an algo-rithm update looks at when a website’s content was published. However, the part that most people are missing is that this algorithm update looks at content freshness only when it’s relevant to certain types of search queries.
There are three types of search queries that will utilize this freshness update:
- Recent events, like news information
- Regularly recurring events, such as sports scores
- Frequent updates, like reviews or top 10 lists
Updating the content on typical website pages won’t help your search ranking directly. However, it’s vital that we don’t end this conversation here!
How Does Content Freshness Help?
Everything we do with a website must be done with the website’s visitors in mind, or else there’s no reason for them to come to your website. With this in mind, let’s explore why you should keep your website content up-to-date.
Let’s face it: updating content properly takes time, and none of us have an excess of time, so an update better be worth it.
You should continuously refresh your website’s content be-cause it improves the user’s experience (UX). It’s been well documented that a positive website experience by your users will lead to improved brand perception, increased brand loyalty and improved conversions.
Earlier, I said refreshing your website’s content won’t directly impact your search rankings, but there are ways that refreshing your content will indirectly help you with your search engine rankings.
One of the most significant ways that content freshness will impact your search rankings is page engagement. Fresh content will improve your website’s engagement with the people visiting your site simply because it contains the latest information. That increase in engagement will help improve your rankings because Google considers engagement a positive ranking factor.
As you update or refresh the content on your website, don’t forget what Google has to say about content, within their Quality Rater Guidelines. Google developed the acronym EEAT to highlight what they consider quality content. This EEAT acronym stands for:
- E: Experience. This means demonstrating your experi-ence on the topic that you’re writing about.
- E: Expertise. Show your level of expertise on your subject matter.
- A: Authoritativeness. This is when others recognize you as an expert by citing or linking to your content.
- T: Trust. Your content builds trust when it demonstrates accuracy and legitimacy for your business.
What is Outdated Content?
The reality is that content doesn’t stay valuable indefinitely; its relevance often will degrade over time. Instead of looking at a published date on your website’s page, it’s better to read the content of a page and determine if that page is still relevant to your company or industry.
Even the “About Us” page could be updated periodically. If your company has gone through a growth spurt, there are prob-ably new people at your company, you may be covering a more extensive geography, or you may have just released an entirely new product line. These topics could and should be covered in your website’s content.
Annual Audit
Though there is no definitive answer to the question of how old is too old for your content, we do recommend auditing your website’s content annually, looking for information that may no longer be relevant or is out of date.
If you’re undecided whether or not the content on a page is still relevant, open up your Google Analytics and take a look at the webpage’s performance over time. Is the time on page metric staying about the same over the past 12-24 months, or is it going down?
If it’s going down, meaning people are on that page for less time—indicating less engagement—then it is possible that the page could use a content refresh, if what the page is talking about is still relevant.
How to Audit Content
The first step you should take to audit content is compile a list of pages that you want to review. The best place to start is with the most important pages of your site—landing pages, blog posts, white papers and your “Contact Us” page. These pages generally represent the highest value to your marketing process.
Once you’ve assembled all the pages you want to review, it’s time to determine the current performance of each page. This gives you a baseline for the next time you audit the page and helps you determine the page’s current performance.
The most important metric to collect is the time on page metric. To get this information, go to your Google Analytics ac-count and navigate to Reports>> Engagement >> Pages and Screens. In this report, you will find a table showing the average amount of time visitors to your website spend on individual pages.
With this metric, it’s important to know that for a user to be registered in Google Analytics 4 (the current Google Analytics platform) as engaged with a website page, they need to be on a page for around 10 seconds.
A Refresh Could be an Opportunity
As long as you’re going through the work of refreshing the content on a website page or pages, now is an excellent time to add a little bit of keyword research to the effort. Depending on how old the original content is, there’s a good chance the key-words that you initially used for that page are no longer relevant.
Take time to reevaluate the keywords that make the most sense for the page you’re updating, and use new, more current keywords for your refresh. This is also a great time to build more or new backlinks to your updated page.
As you change the content, can you think of any websites that would be interested in linking to this new content that pos-sibly weren’t interested in the original content?
Again, a content refresh won’t, all by itself, impact your search rankings, but these are a few areas in which your content refresh will spur other opportunities that could positively impact your SEO.
Structural Improvements: Enhancing Readability, Scannability and User Engagement
Improved content structure is yet another opportunity to enhance your content refresh. Make the information more ac-cessible and engaging by breaking down long paragraphs, or-ganizing information logically and using elements that make it easy to scan:
- Use subheadings to guide readers through each sec-tion, especially for articles over 1,000 words.
- Bullet points and numbered lists are helpful for breaking down complex information or steps, increasing readability.
- Shorten paragraphs to improve flow, and keep sen-tences concise to reduce cognitive load.
- Callouts and quotes can add value by highlighting key insights or expert opinions that draw reader attention.
- Enhanced structure not only benefits user engagement but also aids SEO, as search engines prefer content that’s easy to understand and navigate. Improved readability can lead to longer on-page times and lower bounce rates, signaling quality to search engines.
Incorporating New Media for Enriched User Experience
Today’s readers expect visually engaging content. Multimedia elements like images, infographics and videos can enhance comprehension and make the page more appealing:
- Infographics are great for visualizing complex data or processes and can increase shares and backlinks.
- Videos add depth, whether they’re explainer videos, interviews or brief tutorials that reinforce the written content.
- Images add breaks in the text, providing a visual re-prieve for readers and making the content more ap-proachable. Use captions to describe and optimize these images for SEO.
- If the original content lacks visuals, consider adding diagrams, step-by-step images or even short, embed-ded animations or gifs. This addition not only enriches the user experience but also can improve SEO metrics like time on page and user retention.
Conclusion
Refreshing content isn’t just a quick fix—it’s a strategic move that can breathe new life into underperforming pages, enhance user experience and boost SEO.
By focusing on meaningful updates—such as adding fresh data, refining keywords, improving readability and incorporating multimedia—you can create content that aligns with current user intent and maintains relevance in a constantly shifting digital landscape.
Unlike simple rewording, a full content refresh has the potential to increase organic traffic, improve engagement metrics and ultimately deliver greater value to both users and search engines.
Incorporating content refreshes into your regular content strategy ensures that your site remains authoritative and valuable to your audience over time. To get started, identify pages that could benefit from an update, prioritize those with the highest potential for impact and apply the best practices outlined here.
By Dale Keipert; originally published in SBAM’s March/April 2025 issue of FOCUS magazine
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