How to Update Content on Your Website Fast: 9 Tips
Are you struggling to find the time to update your website's content? Do you know that updating your content is crucial for maintaining your rankings, but it just seems to be the thing that falls to the bottom of your list every single day? If so, you're not alone. Updating content is hard, time-consuming, and not fun. But it's essential for keeping your website relevant and engaging for your audience. In this article, we'll go over nine tips on how to update your content quickly and efficiently, without sacrificing quality.
📝 Table of Contents
1. Shorten those doggone paragraphs up
2. Speaking of short, you sure are sentences
3. Go back and update those titles for a better click-through rate
4. Add a chart
5. Don't just stop at adding a chart, add bullet points
6. Take unique images
7. Embed a video
8. Create a captivating intro
9. Add two to four FAQs
1. Shorten those doggone paragraphs up
Traditional writing and blog-style writing are very different. University-educated writers will pretty much always spit out content that is too long for the web. Most readers view your content on their phone, and phone screens have gotten a lot bigger in the last couple of years, but there still aren't that many words that can fit on the screen at any one given time. Walls of text or paragraphs that extend on and on and on past the field of view they have been shown to decrease readability. So go through your articles, shorten those paragraphs up. Hopefully, you can just hit the carriage return button on some of them, and they don't need a lot of rearranging. I personally opt for no more than three sentences per paragraph, but honestly, I'm not afraid of one and twos in its paragraphs. It skyrockets readability. A couple of great tools to help you out with this are Hemingway and Grammarly.
2. Speaking of short, you sure are sentences
This goes hand in hand with number one, with having shorter paragraphs. It's all about comprehension, and shorter sentences are just plain easier for people to understand. When the average sentence length is 14 words, readers understand more than 90 percent of what they're reading. Expand that to 43 words, and comprehension drops to less than 10 percent. 90/10. That's just comprehension, though. People don't even get to comprehension if they skip over or worse, they bounce off the page. That's what happens when you have big university-style paragraphs. So shorten those sentences up and make them far easier to digest and to read. Honestly, shortening sentences and shortening paragraphs are a powerful one-two punch. This is the first thing that I did on a site I purchased a few years ago, which I provided a link for if you want to learn more about that site. I had an almost immediate impact. Side note: I went on to sell that site for five figures, which was a 5x growth from when we bought it.
3. Go back and update those titles for a better click-through rate
So often, and me at the top of this list, by the way, we are guilty of over-SEOing a title. In other words, we focus on maximizing the keywords in the title, but we slack a bit on peaking interest and intrigue. It sounds a bit like a robot wrote it, or ChatGPT maybe, without any good prompt. But it falls is so very predictable. Once the article ranks, its keyword-rich but semi-boring title doesn't attract attention to SERPs and sends a poor signal to Google. Instead, try flipping that situation on its head. Change those titles to something people are dying to click on. I reference ChatGPT, but I'm being serious. Actually, this is a perfect situation to use ChatGPT. Let's say your keyword is "how to install pavers on top of concrete," and so you make your title "how to install pavers on top of concrete." I know, I bet you never saw that coming, right? Here's my conversation on ChatGPT. You can try something similar. I said to ChatGPT, "I'm writing an article on how to install pavers on top of concrete. Create five titles for my blog post that are incredibly captivating and create a high interest in the reader to click through and read." Look what ChatGPT spit back out. A little long, so I said, "Make these 70 characters or shorter." Look what I got. Granted, somewhere in between the keyword title that we referenced earlier, the boring one, and the keyword title that ChatGPT came up with, somewhere between is probably the best, at least in this case, and your examples will vary as you do it. But use ChatGPT to help you get better, more clickable titles, and then blend that with something that's also keyword-rich.
4. Add a chart
Charts are really easy to make in WordPress and Gutenberg these days, so it's pretty easy to lean into this technique. Charts take complicated info and data, and they break it up into clear visuals that allow readers to make sense of it. By the way, Google loves charts. Google will feature charts and feature snippets in other areas of search. So take a step back and think about your article from a high level. That's what I find works the best. What are the most important questions that a reader needs to answer from this query? Find a way to make a chart that answers one or two of those. If you can get all the answers into one chart, even better. But if you can't, break charts up and answer one question with a chart and then answer another question down the page with a chart. So, for example, if a reader is trying to pick between several wheelbarrows for their yard, create a chart that clearly delineates who each wiggle barrel is best suited for, and then have some data to back it up. Again, like I said earlier, provide ChatGPT your content. It can do a lot of this for you.
5. Don't just stop at adding a chart, add bullet points
People love bullet points. Why? Because most people hate reading, or they're lazy, or maybe they just don't have time. But either way, bullet points give people what they want as fast as possible. Speak about readability. It gives them the information in about as easy of a digestible fashion as possible. Because it helps readability, it's a great way to update your content, right? I find that so many things that writers say can honestly be summarized in bullet points. Same goes for you if you're the one writing.
6. Take unique images
If you open up an article of yours that needs updating, sometimes it is a topic that is really easy to get your phone out and add a few unique images to. I know I talk a lot about unique images on here, but part of the reason is because it's so easy to do, and the return is so high. Taking pictures of certain things or certain concepts for your content is really easy, especially if you know a couple of techniques and tricks, and the return on investment is very high for the time you put in. So, for example, we took on a new client a little while ago in the pest niche. Yep, bug control. A lot of the articles we needed to update for them were talking about different types of outdoor surfaces and whether you could spray a pest control on it. Well, it's pretty easy. I looked at the list, and I noted a few surfaces that I had at my house: concrete, pavers, grass, mulch, brick. Honestly, five minutes later, I had two to three images for each of these articles. Simple ROI, very high. Don't overcomplicate it. Yes, the pictures need to be good enough, but they don't have to be works of art. We're not asking to turn into Ansel Adams here. Good enough is plenty good enough.
7. Embed a video
More and more, Google loves video. Makes sense, they own YouTube. But it also makes sense because people love video. YouTube has been growing like crazy, especially since 2019-2020, certainly with the pandemic, and Google started to feature video a lot more in the SERPs. But it also makes for a great way to update your content. Best-case scenario is to make a topically relevant video for your article. That's right, you make a video, put it on YouTube, and then embed that in your article. That's best-case. But a close second is to make a video that works for a whole topical cluster, and then you can use it across a number of different articles. If not, if you really don't want to get out of camera and really don't want to get in front of the camera and make a video, find a good niche-relevant video on YouTube and then embed it in your content. You're still at least providing a video for people to engage with.
8. Create a captivating intro
I get it, intros are so boring. But the problem is that when you make it boring, you will lose your readers, and then you lose their traffic, their revenue, and their purchases. Oftentimes people make the mistake of being overly summarizing in intros. That's what the conclusion is for. The intro should build intrigue. It should build curiosity. So set the stage for what they're going to learn. No one does this better than a friend of mine, JBI. I interviewed him on the Niche Pursuits podcast a while back, and he calls his approach the SPEAR approach. I include a link; you can go read up on it. But the bottom line is make sure that your intros are captivating. One thing I do is I write the intro after I'm done with the article, or I will often rewrite an intro for an article that a writer provided after I read the article they wrote. It's a lot easier to write an intro after you've seen what the content is because you can really speak to it. Try that out, maybe.
9. Add two to four FAQs
Frequently asked questions, also called FAQs, they're very simple to add, and they're great for updating content. Here's my super quick process for adding these. Google your article's main keyword. Find the "people also ask" section of the SERP. Take the first three relevant questions. Not relevant is the keyword here because there's going to be lots of irrelevant ones. Find the first three that are relevant, and then answer these at the bottom of your blog post. Make sure you mark them up with FAQ snippet. Rank Math makes this super easy to do. They're my go-to. Finally, check that the rich results test shows that your FAQ snippet, that your FAQ schema, is being recognized. I always use the rich results one because that's the one that Google uses. So again, adding FAQs is a great way to update content, and it's a great way to give Google an FAQ snippet that they love.
🌟 Highlights
- Shorten paragraphs and sentences to improve readability
- Update titles to be more clickable and intriguing
- Use charts and bullet points to break up complex information
- Add unique images and videos to engage readers
- Create captivating intros to build curiosity
- Add FAQs to provide valuable information and improve SEO
❓ FAQ
Q: How often should I update my website's content?
A: It depends on your website's niche and the frequency of changes in your industry. However, it's recommended to update your content at least once a year.
Q: Can I update my content without changing the URL?
A: Yes, you can update your content without changing the URL. However, if you make significant changes to the content, it's recommended to update the URL as well.
Q: How do I know if my content needs updating?
A: You can use tools like Google Analytics to track your website's traffic and engagement. If you notice a decline in traffic or engagement, it's a sign that your content needs updating.
Q: Can I outsource content updating?
A: Yes, you can outsource content updating to freelance writers or content agencies. However, make sure to provide clear guidelines and expectations to ensure quality and consistency.
Resources:
- Hemingway: https://hemingwayapp.com/
- Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com/
- Rank Math: https://rankmath.com/
- JBI's SPEAR approach: https://www.nichepursuits.com/spear-approach/
- AI Chatbot: https://www.voc.ai/product/ai-chatbot
