How to Keep Your Website Fresh (Without Agony)

When you set up a website, you put a lot of effort into creating power pages, and into creating content based on long-tail keywords, or search terms, that seem likely to attract good prospects.

(Related: How to Create ‘Pillar Pages’ That Will Make Your Web Traffic Take Off)

The next thing you need to do is refresh the current content that you have.

Refreshing your content is the most powerful way to increase your traffic fast with little to no effort.

Here are four ways to do that.

1. Recycle your old content.

Find any content on your site that’s more than a year old and that isn’t on the first page of Google. Rewrite it.

You want to make the new version 1,000 words longer than the original. Update the new version with details relevant now, such as rate changes, or company name changes.

2. Consider combining old content.

You can also combine small pieces of content to create a longer post that’s likely to get more traffic.

For instance, if you have one page with the title “How to use an annuity to pay for retirement” and another with the title “How annuity withdrawals work,” there is a good chance these posts are competing with each other. To make the content longer, and help the page rank for more keywords, put the content from both posts on one page.

3. Optimize the keywords.

Use a tool like SemRush or Ahrefs to find out what keywords that could be in the post are ranking between positions 10 and 20 on Google. Add those keywords to the new version of the post.

4. Reset the clock.

Once you finish making the changes, update the “Published” date for your post, so that the new version shows the current date.

Making your content more relevant, combining content, adding more than 1,000 more words, and updating the date can easily start increasing your organic traffic in 30 days.

— Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Sa El is the co-founder of Simply Insurance. He is a licensed life and health insurance agent.