Effective Strategies to Identify and Update Your Content

If you are a content marketer, you cannot do without good content if you want to make sales. That makes good content hugely important to the survival of your business. Luckily, because of the proliferation of AI writing tools, it is fairly easier to churn out good content these days. Individuals and business owners can now create and distribute more good content at a rapid rate. However, to build a successful content marketing strategy, you don’t need new content alone. You must explore all ways to in addition to new content update old content as well to improve the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. This can be critical to the success of your business.

Here is How Critical It Can Be: Updated good content,
Helps to enhance user experience
Increases audience engagement
Boosts content credibility
Attracts new visitors
Retains existing audience
Helps to keep pace with industry trends
Prevents content decay
Helps search engines to find accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information.

For these reasons, smart content marketers always explore many ways to strategize their content updates. This they do by diligently searching for and finding their outdated content, rewriting them and using them to update their posts.  In this quest, the following 5 key steps do come in handy to identify outdated content.

 1. Keeping a Diligent Watch for Partner, Product, and Industry Updates: Always watch out for updates from your partners, changes in your product/services, and developments in your niche industry. The information you glean can impact the accuracy and relevance of your content. Since changes are taking place on the internet very rapidly, staying updated is quite relevant to the effectiveness of good content.

2. Reviewing Your Content Regularly: It helps your content marketing strategy if you can set a schedule to review your content regularly. This task can be as important if not more important than crafting new content. It is preferable to create valuable time routinely to manually review your older content posts or information. This is about the best way to locate what content needs to be updated and to what extent.

3. Closely Monitoring Social Media: Social media has become one treasure trove of information aside its huge popularity. So, if you closely monitor social media, especially hashtags related to your industry, product, or service, you’ll be able to identify topics that are trending you can adapt and treat in your content.

4. Reading Comments and Feedback on Your Content: User Generated Content USG is hugely valuable. You can get USG by paying attention to the comments and feedback from your readers. Through USG, you can get information that is no longer accurate and may require updating. Some USG can even suggest updates your readers would like to see.

5. Deploying and Using Smart SEO Tools: With the use of smart SEO tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Ahrefs, you can easily track changes in the performance of your content. These smart tools can help you to find content pages with decreasing traffic, falling search rankings, or declining engagement. Such pages are usually very good candidates for updates.

Best Steps/Practices to Get the Right Results

As a marketer, it can be really gratifying to see your content updating efforts manifesting clearly in your boosted search rankings, traffic, leads and even sales. For this reason, when updating your content, make sure you do things right by way of best steps/practices. It is only by so doing you stand the chance to get good results that may be worth your while. When you update your content, the goal is to ensure the content remains informative, authoritative, and friendly while staying relevant and valuable to your audience. Always make sure your updated content is of high-quality, relevant, and consistent with your overall brand image. The following steps/practices are quite handy in that quest.

Review Your Content Regularly: Time lapse for reviews should not be too long before reviewing your older content. It is best to do it regularly to keep it up-to-date and relevant.

Be Thorough in Your Reviews: Mere cosmetic changes are not too helpful for your content updates. Ensure you are thorough in doing so. Always try to update any outdated information or links. Smart search engine bots can always detect unhelpful changes. So, you must avoid mere superficial changes if you want to maintain your rankings.

Be Consistent in Your Tone: If a piece of content was written in a specific tone, it helps to maintain that same tone throughout the new updates. This is because search engines never fail to notice inconsistency.

Be Consistent in Your Style: You must endeavor to maintain style consistency across all your content. This helps to make it easier for new team members to understand the tone and voice of your brand. Search engines do take note as well.

Encourage Communication in Your Content Team: Content uniformity is vital as well. If you encourage communication among your writers and editors, you can maintain uniformity in your team. That way, team members can ask relevant questions, get the right information when updating content and get the right guides if the communication among them is good.