Page updates are one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO.

It’s easy to get caught up in producing more and more new pages and content – and that should be part of your SEO strategy if it makes sense and is driving results.

But you shouldn’t just publish the content and then never touch it again.

Taking a step back to update and optimize your existing pages and content can lead to some of the biggest – and sometimes easiest – SEO wins for your website.

Identifying opportunities for page updates is one of the first things I do when auditing websites.

I’ll illustrate with some examples.

Here’s 5 SEO success stories I achieved by updating pages.

Site-wide Content Audit and Updates

This one was for a niche e-commerce website with a heavy focus on content marketing.

There’s about 100 articles driving SEO traffic to the website, and we decided to do an in-depth analysis to identify articles with growth potential – eventually selecting 20 articles to update.

Here’s the results:

That’s a 34% increase in organic traffic for all articles combined, year over year.

Huge!

To achieve this, we used Ahrefs’ content gap analysis tool.

Our articles were already ranking very well, with top 3 rankings for many of the main keywords.

Using the tool, we compared each of our articles against 3-5 competing articles that were also ranking on the first page.

The 20 articles we selected for updating were all articles that had a clear content gap – meaning at least one or more of our competitors were covering the topic more in-depth, and they were ranking for a broader set of keywords.

Adding the missing information – of course, without blatantly copying our competitors – was the key to achieving these great results.

Let’s take a look at an example of an individual article update.

Adding Missing Information to an Article

This is what the traffic graph looks like for an individual article we updated.

It’s an interesting case.

After re-crawling and indexing the content after the update, there’s an immediate traffic spike.

This is Google “testing the waters” by giving the article great visibility for a broad (new) set of keywords.

It probably appeared at #1 for a short period of time.

After 2 days, the rankings and traffic settled back down, but at a higher daily clicks baseline than before the update. The article is now driving additional traffic from keywords related to the new sections we added.

It’s hard to see in the graph due to the traffic spike, but the article is now generating 15% more SEO traffic than before the update.

I’ll take it!

The Complete Content Overhaul

The below example is an article we changed pretty drastically.

We updated the entire format of the article, and added more engaging page elements such as comparison tables, images, and embedded YouTube videos.

Here’s what happened:

After the update, there was an immediate increase in clicks and impressions, after which it gradually kept increasing over time.

Eventually, it settled on about 3x the clicks it was driving before.

With this one, we realized we didn’t quite hit the mark with the initial article we published.

Our article was decent, but it was stuck somewhere between positions 7-10 for most search queries, as it didn’t fully meet search intent and was frankly less useful than the top 3 results.

After the updates, our article was much better optimized for search intent, and Google rewarded it with more clicks and impressions.

Nice!

Updating Just The Page Title of a Product Category Page

This update was for a B2B financial services provider that also sells hardware products that are closely related to their service.

There are several ways people describe this piece of hardware and different names they give to it – in reality, they are all referring to the same thing.

Our product category page was optimized for the most common name this product is known as, with the highest monthly search volume.

However, this search term is also extremely competitive to rank for.

The website was competing with actual e-commerce websites, while for this company, their service offering was the main focus of the website and the products they sold were just a single category.

Still – anyone enquiring about the products is very valuable to this company, as they often succeed in upselling their full service offering.

After some research, we saw an opportunity to optimize the page for a lesser-used term to refer to this type of product.

Here’s what happened after changing only the page title – nothing else.

Even though it felt counterintuitive at first – the page is now driving triple the amount of clicks from SEO.

We’re still talking about only 6 clicks per day on average, after the update.

But these are very valuable clicks driven by keywords with a high buyer intent.

There’s a direct impact on enquiries and sales for this business – which is ultimately what matters.

And all it took was re-wording the page title to target a different keyword variation – nothing else. A perfect example of the SEO pareto principle at work.

Enriching a Landing Page with Text and Tables

This last example is a landing page that contains a comparison between several different B2B service providers, of which my client is one.

Comparison pages should be part of any service provider’s SEO strategy.

But in this case, it wasn’t executed optimally.

The page only contained a large image detailing the differences and pros and cons of the competitors.

It’s a well-designed, good looking, engaging image.

But the landing page contained no text at all.

Google is getting better and better at understanding what a page is about – but if you don’t provide any context on the page, ranking is going to be an uphill battle.

We decided to enrich the page with some text and comparison tables, placing them under the existing image. It basically told the same story that was already present in the image. Except in this format, Google could actually make sense of it!

Here’s the result:

The page immediately started driving traffic to the website.

Traffic from keywords directly related to comparing different service providers, from people who are close to making a buying decision.

That’s super valuable traffic to have.

All that was needed in this case was to give Google a little nudge in the right direction by adding written content to the page.

The Power of Analyzing and Updating Your Pages Regularly

Regular page updates should be part of any long-term SEO strategy.

Even if your page is ranking in the top 3 right now, it might not stay there.

If the keyword you are targeting is valuable, it’s only a matter of time before your competitors go after it too.

Implement a process to stay on top of what’s needed to rank well for your target keywords, and update your pages so they are better than your competitors.

And in some cases, your existing pages might just be missing the mark – some minor updates and SEO optimizations can be sufficient to drive results.

Contact me if you need help identifying opportunities for SEO updates on your website.