Boosting your SEO with Old Content

Some of the sites we work on are brand new – either custom builds or sites that have been built on an out-of-the-box platform like Shopify, WordPress etc, and they’re starting from scratch when it comes to traffic and SEO. A lot of our clients are established businesses however, with websites several years old and content that’s been built up gradually over time. Often, the person running the website doesn’t know the full extent of the content that’s available – parts of the site don’t get refreshed or even looked at very often, or the focus is always on creating new products and new features.

Whilst jumping onto new trends and adding new content is always great for marketing, there’s a lot that you can do to make sure old, legacy content is working hard from an SEO perspective. Today, I thought I’d have a quick look at why its worthwhile and offer a few action points to anyone doing SEO on an established site.

Why is looking at old content worth the effort?

Reviewing old content can be a shortcut when it comes to SEO success. Hopefully, a lot of the keywords and user queries you’re thinking about are already covered by older content – even if its not perfect it can give you a head-start rather than having to research and create loads of pages from scratch.

Some of these legacy pages might even have links to them – they’ve had more time to pick them up after all. If the page is already strong due to its authority, working on it is definitely a better idea than starting fresh.

From a user perspective (and we should always take the user’s perspective) its also an opportunity to make sure that all pages on the site offer the most relevant and recent information. Think about a service page which still mentions 2024 for example when it’s now 2025 – if the user experience is spot-on your other metrics like bounce rate and dwell time should improve, all of which are ranking factors.

So where do you start?

So what exactly do you need to do to capitalise on this SEO goldmine? The first step is to conduct an audit to work out what content you actually have available. A tool like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console is your friend here, to see what pages exist and what pages are indexed.

Then, you need to look at performance metrics. What keywords (if any) does a page rank for, how much traffic does it get, and is that traffic valuable (i.e. does it convert?). This allows you to create a priority list of pages to start working on.

Finally, your audit is the time to identify content gaps. It might be that a set of keywords has just never been properly targeted on the website – or maybe you even have pages that are duplicating work and overlapping too much. It should all go into your plan to address.

The optimisation begins

Once you have your priority list – I’m a fan of just using a big spreadsheet – its time to update your pages. This could be as simple as updating dates, refreshing statistics or adding the latest information, but its also a good chance to really tweak the technical side – headings, meta data, formatting, schema, internal links – to get everything as good as possible and bring it up to the latest SEO standards.

Think about the format

A lot of older sites will have traditional blogs, but what about the way people share information now? One of the most interesting aspects of content reviews (for me anyway) is the opportunity to repurpose content into other formats for today’s audience. For example, would the topic or angle of a page make a good social post? What about a topic for a podcast? There are lots of ways to get more mileage out of old thinking, and appeal to broader audience who consume content on newer platforms.

Re-promote content

One of the biggest crimes against content is when it gets posted once, and then never ever gets shared again. Lots of things stay relevant, so it’s worth thinking about whether any of your content warrants being pushed out again, in a newsletter for example or even highlighted on your website.

5. Promote and Re-share the Updated Content

Once your old content is optimised, don’t forget about it—actively promote it again to get the most out of your effort. Here’s how:

• Re-share on Social Media: Share the updated post on your social media channels. Consider using different messaging and images to appeal to different segments of your audience.
• Send to Your Email List: If you have an email list, notify your subscribers about the updated content. Let them know the post has been refreshed with new information.
• Reach Out for Backlinks: If the content is comprehensive and valuable, you can reach out to websites or influencers who might link to your updated post. Building backlinks to the updated content will improve its SEO performance.
• Use Paid Advertising: If you have the budget, consider running paid ads to promote the updated post to a wider audience, especially if it’s an important piece of content.

6. Monitor Performance and Iterate

After updating and promoting your old content, it’s important to track its performance – hopefully you’ll see some nice new traffic coming in and better engagement rates from your users.

• Check Keyword Rankings: Monitor how the keywords you’re targeting are ranking over time.
• Track Bounce Rate: An improvement in bounce rate is a good indicator that your content is more relevant and engaging.
• Measure Traffic: Look at changes in organic traffic to your refreshed content to gauge its effectiveness.

When should you start work on your old content?

It might take a decent amount of effort, but leveraging your old content for SEO is still a resource-efficient way to boost your site’s performance, so there’s really no time like the present to get started with this exercise. Once you have a completed audit and you’re happy with a robust action plan to work through it, we’d generally advise repeating the process every year or so as a piece of housekeeping. You’ll likely find that some content continues to perform well year after year given the right attention, and becomes a cornerstone of your content plan.