How refreshing existing content landed our client a new lead within two days

Updated 30 March 2023

Since publication, our client’s post has driven five (5) leads in two weeks.

This is the power of targeting lower-funnel keywords like ‘best’ and ‘cost’.

In this short case study, we’ll show you how updating a client’s existing blog post delivered a new lead within days.

Situation

Our client had a great post aimed at customers in the consideration and decision stages of the purchase cycle.

The article was first published in March 2020 and targeted “best [product] australia” (client identity protected).

The post was ranking #8 on Google for that search term.

It’s a highly commercial term and according to Semrush, the keyword difficulty is ‘easy’:

This is low hanging fruit that’s ripe for the picking.

Action

These are the exact steps we took to move this blog post from #8 to #2 within days:

1. We used Surfer to audit the content and then flesh it out to ensure we were covering all the important subtopics we need to.
2. Added original insights from the client.
3. Re-wrote the page title and subheadings to make them more relevant.
4. Built three contextually relevant internal links to the post as best practice.
5. Submitted the page for re-indexing via Google Search Console.

Outcome

While it’s great to see the rankings boost, the best part was securing a lead directly from the blog post within two days.

Here’s a screenshot from the client’s Google Analytics account showing the blog post landing page and goal completion:

Here’s a screenshot from Semrush showing the rankings improvement after refreshing the content and asking Google to re-crawl it:

How to quickly refresh an existing blog post:

1. Pick the low hanging fruit first – updating a blog post ranking #8 can give you faster results than content ranking #28.
2. Load the blog post into Surfer or Clearscope and use the tool as a guide to ensure you’re covering the topics you need to.
3. Make sure your post has some original, expert insight or proprietary data to help separate it from the pack.
4. Hit publish and build some contextually relevant internal links to the post.
5. Load up Google Search Console and ask Google to re-crawl it.

Sometimes in the rush to create new content, we can forget about updating existing posts on our site that can generate real, measurable impact.

So, if updating existing content is not part of your digital strategy, ask your SEO company why not!

If you want to start generating results like these, get in touch for a free SEO audit and some quick wins you can implement immediately.