The #1 SEO Hack: Why Content Refreshes Beat New Content

0:00On this episode of the show, I want to talk about content refreshes and why people in SEO are so obsessed with them. I've seen some people say that content refreshes are maybe the greatest hack in search engine optimization. And the more I think about it, there's a lot of great hacks out there, but the more I think about it, the more it's hard for me not to agree. When you wait a bit to come back to content that is published, you're able to look at it through fresh eyes. And if it's not performing the way that it should, it's a lot easier to see why it is not performing as well as it

0:36should be performing, then you have to update it. And updating an existing piece of content is often times way less work than making a new piece of content. And when you make that new piece of content, then you still need to wait months to re-evaluate it with fresh eyes. So content refreshes, less work. You're able to improve it because you are reading the content now as an actual visitor will be reading the content and not as a person who made it on your site. You would much rather have many excellent SEO pages than lots of just mediocre ones. The reason for this is because the difference in traffic when

1:13you are ranking number one and anything before that is crazy dramatic. The click-through rate for position one on Google is 39.8%. The click-through rate for position two on Google, what do you think it is? You think maybe it's 30%, 25%. It's 18.7%. Literally less than half the click-through rate of position one. So again, you would rather have a lot of excellent SEO pages than many mediocre ones. And fixing a bad piece of content, again, oftentimes can be less work than

1:51making a brand new piece of content. Something else that people don't consider is the first draft is usually the worst draft. You go back to some piece of content you made. Maybe it's a bottom of funnel SEO landing page. Maybe it's a blog post. Whatever it is, and you're like, "Oh, I wasn't targeting my keyword naturally. This is so awkward, and here's how I can do it, and this sounds way better." You're you're fixing the improper targeting that you had. Or you learn new techniques since you published the page or the post. You can incorporate that. Like, actually, I was going back. In fact, I I shared on

2:25yesterday's episode of the show how now I'm obsessed with putting quizzes, AI quizzes into my content where I have Chat GBT generate a quiz for my content and then I have Claude code it and then I embed it into my blog posts or pages or whatever. And I've been going back into into my content and just inserting these quizzes. And this is a new technique that I learned that I am now incorporating into older pieces of content. And actually when I'm when I'm doing this, I'm also realizing, oh yeah, I wasn't targeting some keywords properly or this reads awkward or this is weird. Let me fix this. And I end up

3:00making enough fixes that when I'm done, I actually update the publishing date to be the current date. So maybe I wrote it 3 months ago or a year ago, but now it's fully updated. So I say it's the publish date is now, and then I'm resubmitting to Google Search Console, which you always want to do when you update a piece of content. Always submit to Google Search Console so Google crawls your page or posts and sees the changes that you made. I talked about incorporating keywords. So after you publish a page or a post, wait a bit and

3:32then see what it is already ranking for. Maybe it is not ranking for its target keyword or it is ranking for its target keyword, but it's also ranking for lots of other keywords and you're able to see what it is ranking for. And then you can incorporate those exact keywords if it's natural into the content of your page or post. And I've been doing that a lot myself. So you go to Google Search Console, go to performance on the left side, click search results, then click pages, click on a page, and then under queries, you're able to see what your pages are ranking for. Some of these

4:02keywords, again, if they're natural, just work them in to the exact copy of your page or your post. And now you rank better for these keywords. you get more traffic because you're ranking better. This works if your page is already ranking number one for its target keyword or if it's not ranking number one for its target keyword. You're going back to the page. You're strengthening the page so it's more likely to rank number one for it. You're incorporating similar keywords which people are also interested in which the page is ranking

4:31for. You're improving the page overall. Again, the difference between position one and position two and other positions so dramatic. You want to get that position one spot. And again, like I said, the amount of work that it takes to go and fix a page versus creating a new page. Crazy how much easier it is. The thing is, aside from the keyword targeting, which is very, very important. A lot of SEO just comes down to having better content. And when you make the content for the first time, it's really hard to judge it objectively, when you are fresh off of making it. That's why artists always say

5:10that it's so much easier to evaluate their art when they go back and look at it after waiting a bit. It's the same thing with SEO content. It's the exact same thing. So, I'm making this because next time you are deciding between making new content and refreshing existing content, just consider, do you have any pieces that you could refresh? And chances are, if you are active in SEO, you likely do. And that is all that I got for you on episode 787 of my daily digital marketing show. This is the Edward Show. 787 days in a row doing this podcast. And if you are going hard

5:46with SEO or doing some SEO, consider my SEO course, Compact Keywords, which will tremendously expedite your success with learning SEO that gets paying customers, that gets users, that gets warm leads. It was designed to help you get conversions with search engine optimization. I update this thing so much. I literally made an update a few hours ago to the course. I just am trying to make this the best SEO course

6:15on the planet. I think I've done that. People ask me, is it still updated? It is constantly updated. So that is at compactkeywords.com. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bino.