Updating an old page instead of writing a new one

The standard advice on content refreshing is written for publishers. Find posts with declining clicks, rewrite them, republish. It works, and the famous example is a large SEO company doubling traffic overnight after rewriting one article.

You do not have hundreds of posts. You have fourteen pages, and the ones most worth updating are not the blog posts.

The reframing

For a publisher, an out-of-date page loses traffic. For a local business, an out-of-date page loses money directly, and it does it whether or not anyone is searching.

• A page quoting a callout fee you raised eighteen months ago. Every person who reads it and rings is having a conversation about a price you no longer charge.
• A service page for something you stopped offering. Enquiries you decline, each one costing you the time to say no.
• A page listing an area you no longer cover, or missing one you now do.
• Hours, staff names, brands you stock. Every one of them is a small credibility loss when a customer notices.

The order to work in

1. Anything with a number on it

Prices, fees, response times, years in business, team size, number of vans. Go through every page and check each figure. This takes an hour on a small site and it is the highest return hour available.

The years-in-business one catches almost everybody. A homepage saying fifteen years, written four years ago, is now wrong and is understating you.

2. Your best service page

The one that brings in the most work. Read it as a customer would. It was probably written when the business was smaller and it probably no longer describes what you actually do.

Add what you have learnt since: the questions you now get asked, the objection you now handle, the two jobs you have done that prove the point.

3. Pages ranking just outside the top ten

This is the one piece of publisher advice that transfers cleanly. In Search Console, find pages with impressions and few clicks, or an average position around eleven to twenty.

Those are pages Google is already prepared to show and is not quite convinced by. Improving one of them is far cheaper than starting a new page from nothing.

4. Anything with a date visible on it

A blog post dated three years ago reads as a business that stopped. Either update it and change the date honestly, or remove the date from the template if the content is timeless.

What an update should actually change

Not the publication date and a few synonyms, which is what most refreshes amount to.

1. 01Correct every fact. Prices, hours, areas, services, names.
2. 02Answer a question you now get asked that the page does not address. You have three years of phone calls that the original author did not have.
3. 03Add a real example. A job you have done since, with the constraint that made it interesting.
4. 04Add two internal links, to and from. Pages written in isolation stay isolated.
5. 05Cut anything that is no longer true or no longer matters. Refreshes usually add and rarely remove, and the removing is half the value.

Two pages, one topic

Small sites accumulate near-duplicates: a service page and a blog post about the same thing, written two years apart by different people.

They compete with each other, and Google picks one, usually not the one you would choose. Merge them: take the better content from both onto the stronger page, then redirect the weaker one to it. Do not delete without a redirect, which throws away whatever it had earned.

How often

Once a year, in one sitting, with a checklist. That is enough for a site of this size, and it is far more valuable than a monthly refresh schedule nobody keeps.

For most local businesses this is a better use of the hours than publishing something new, which is an argument made in full in is blogging worth it. The linking step is covered in internal linking.