 Hey everybody, Cyrus here. This is my final speaker introduction of the session. And I'm so happy that it's someone that's really cool. So if you follow SEO online at all, follow the online marketing world, what would you say is one of the hottest companies going in SEO and online marketing? It's actually a platform. And yes, I'm talking about Shopify. They've assembled such a big talent pool. If you have Shopify on your resume right now, that means you're doing something really good. So Cameron Jenkins is content lead at Shopify. Before that, she actually worked here at Moz and Bodify, where she did some amazing work. So Cameron's job is to create content that ranks and converts, and she's very good at it. But here, she asks a question. When you have limited resources, why spend all your time creating new content when older content has a better chance of ranking? That's what she's gonna talk about. Hey everyone, I wanted to kick things off today with a little bit of a scenario. And if you're a content marketer, I have a feeling this might sound a little familiar to you. Let's say, for example, you have pretty ambitious traffic KPIs to hit. And those traffic KPIs have prompted you to decide on a publishing cadence of somewhere around two posts per week, which for your small team, or maybe even it's just you, it's keeping you pretty busy. Most of your posts perform okay, but for some reason, when you look back at your month after month traffic in aggregate, things are stagnating. That's the unfortunate reality for a lot of us who work on sites with a lot of legacy content. Blogs and other content properties that have been around for a few years definitely have their work cut out for them. And that's because of something called content decay. Content decay is the natural deterioration of content performance over time. It looks like this and it has a variety of causes. For one, Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm so that the SERPs better match the intent of people's queries. Your competitors are constantly vying for your spots, information is always falling out of date, and your website's changing all the time. Content decay, in my opinion, poses one of the biggest risk to brands that rely on content to generate inbound leads and revenue. I wanted to hop back to this screenshot for a second just to illustrate how big of a problem this can be. This is a post on one of the blogs that I manage. And at its peak, it was bringing us about 4,000 sessions every week. And at its lowest point, which you can see here, less than 600 sessions per week. Now, we know when it comes to traffic, it's kind of all relative. There are some posts and topics where 600 sessions per week would be nothing to scoff at, but for this post, we knew it could and should be doing a lot more for us. So if you see things like this in your analytics data, just know that all hope is not lost. There is something we can do about it. And that something is content refreshes. Content refreshes involve updating your existing content to reclaim its lost traffic. But even though content refreshes are the antidote to this huge business problem, the content marketers I surveyed, most of them said that only zero to 25% of their calendars were dedicated to refreshes. So let's fix that. Over the next couple of minutes, I'm gonna walk you through the exact process that I use to refresh my content. There are three main steps to my process. Identify, execute, and iterate. So of course, let's start with identification. How do we even know which content needs a refresh? Now, because we're talking about organic search traffic, this isn't something we can guess at. Our guts, unfortunately, are not gonna tell us what to do here, but we do have tools at our disposal to help. So let's start by diving into Google Analytics. And one of the reports that I default to in Google Analytics is the landing page report. To get there, just go to behavior, site content, landing pages. Step two, make sure you're looking at only your organic traffic and step three is to set your date range. Now, there's no hard roll on the date range. I personally here have six months over the previous six months. You can do 12 over 12. Just make sure you zoom out enough to see a trend. And what you're looking for is posts like this. Posts that have lost a pretty substantial amount of traffic over that time period. When you click into those posts and isolate the trend line for those posts, you will likely see that they've been declining over time. And this is a good potential opportunity for a refresh. Now, a word of warning here is that session loss does not necessarily equate with ranking loss. There are actually a lot of reasons why your organic sessions might be down, aside from ranking loss. It could be that the post has just lost demand over time. The topic has lost demand over time. Maybe seasonality as at play. There are a lot of reasons that could be causing this. So that's why I like to pair my Google Analytics strategy with this next strategy I'm gonna show you in Google Search Console. So step one in Google Search Console is to filter to make sure I'm only looking at data from the property I care about. So for example, I'm using just show me blog. Step two is to set your date range. Much like Google Analytics, you can set your date range to six months, 12 months, just zoom out enough in order to see a trend. And step three for me is to export. There are a lot of things you can do natively in the Google Search Console UI, but I personally like to export so that I have a little bit more control over how I sort and I filter. So I'm gonna go ahead and export. And what I'm gonna see here is my queries, last six months position, previous six months position. I'm gonna remove everything else like impressions, clicks and CTR. And then I'm gonna add this column to calculate position difference with this formula you see here. You sort this and then you'll easily be able to see which queries you lost the most positions for over time. And this is really gonna help you pinpoint which content is in most in need of a refresh because it's lost organic position. Now those two strategies can potentially net you a lot of opportunities for refreshes. And of course, we don't have all of the time in the world. We have limited resources. So we're gonna need to prioritize. And one of my favorite ways for prioritizing is by conversions. Now every company keeps track of this a little bit differently, but one common way I've found is by tracking your goal conversions in Google Analytics. By doing this, you're gonna be able to see things like conversion rate and total number of goal completions right alongside your sessions and other metrics in reports that you probably look at all the time like your landing page report. The reason I wanna prioritize pages that have the highest conversion rate is because by increasing the traffic to those pages, I'm going to get the most amount of conversions possible. Another tip for prioritizing is by trending topics. So let's say for example, you're in your Google search console, you see a query where its impressions have spiked, but you're ranking pretty much the same for it. That could indicate that the topic is trending and you might wanna piggyback off of that. And the third tip for prioritizing is just to be in tune with your business's priorities. There are probably certain topics that your business cares about more than others at any given time and that is a totally valid way to prioritize. Okay, so you have your refresh opportunities, you have them all prioritize. The next step is to execute. How do we actually go about refreshing content? What does that process look like? And there are three main questions I wanna ask here and that's what's table stakes, what's gonna give us a competitive advantage and what's gonna help us maximize conversions. So let's start with table stakes. Because we're talking about organic search traffic decline, one of the things that I wanna know is well, which queries did we lose the most positions for? Now this screenshots likely gonna look familiar. That's because we're gonna use the same process as we just used in Google Search Console. The only difference is that instead of looking at traffic and data for the entirety of our blog, we are going to filter by the URL that we're refreshing and that singular URL. So what we're gonna be left with is a list of queries that that particular post has lost the most positions for over time. That's really gonna help us point us in the right direction and see what we actually need to improve on the page. Another thing I like to do is just Google the terms that my page is targeting and seeing what is ranking. If not us, then who and what are those pages look like? This is a good way to get Google's understanding of what the standard is for this query. Another step that I like to take in the refresh process is seeing if there are any consolidation opportunities. So to do this, I go into Google Search Console, I filter by query and I see if there are multiple pages on my site that are vying for that term. It could be the case, not always, but it could be the case that there are opportunities to consolidate those posts into one stronger post rather than multiple potentially weaker competing posts. Another thing that I think is table stakes in addition to query targeting is internal linking. And I think a lot of people assume that because a page has been on your site for a long time, it already has all the internal links it needs. And more often than not, I actually find that there's more opportunity here. And one of my favorite ways for finding those opportunities is by using a Google Search operator, like you see here. What you'll probably get back is a list of URLs, at least a couple, where there's opportunity to go in and add more links to the page that you're refreshing. And this is so important because internal links are a big contributing factor to ranking, so we wanna make sure we have this base covered. And it's likely also the case that your post already has some internal links to it, in which case I like to use refreshes as an opportunity to audit those links. You can do that with a crawler like Screaming Frog, and Seer has a really great guide to helping you through that, making sure that your links aren't broken, that they're not going through redirects, and that they have descriptive anchor text or some things that I like to check into. The next question we wanna ask is what's gonna give us a competitive advantage? One of my favorite ways to give my refreshes a competitive advantage is by including original research. Now you definitely don't have to use a fancy expensive firm like Forester to do this. A lot of times I find that companies are sitting on a lot of data themselves. And to take this as an example, Shopify's content marketers last year worked alongside of our data science team to publish this BFCM by the numbers post. But even if something like that is a little bit too high of a lift and you need something that's a little bit more manageable, you can always do your own original research by using free tools like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform. Another thing that I like to do to help my refreshes stand out is to include original expert quotes. So if you're not sure where to get these, I have a few tips for you. Try going to your sales team. They might love to connect you with a prospect to contribute a quote. Your partnerships team can likely hook you up with a partner who's an expert in something you're writing about. Same with your success team with your customers. You can post a call for quotes on your own Twitter and LinkedIn profiles and get those from your own network. And if your company has a podcast, I would definitely recommend going through those transcripts and seeing if there are opportunities to pull quotes from that. And it has the added benefit of promoting your podcast as well. So I wanna switch gears a little bit because so far we've talked a lot about how to improve our rankings, but I think refreshes are also an opportunity to evaluate how is this page gonna show up in the search results. So here you see an example of FAQ schema. This is something we implemented on our page and we were lucky enough to get this kind of question and answer accordion style feature in our search result. That was able to get us a lot more clicks than we were getting with just a standard result. And the same idea goes here. This is how to schema, but it's exactly the same kind of idea that we're going for. It's taking up more real estate on the search results. It's a little bit more eye-catching. We're getting more clicks because of it. Another thing that my team started doing is adding these jump to links. And we originally did this for user experience. We wanted to make it super easy to have readers be able to navigate throughout the page, especially on longer posts. So you see here this table of contents. You click on one of those and it takes you down to that section of the page. But we also noticed that this was having the added benefit of showing up these little site links in our search results listing, which is pretty cool. If you're interested in learning more about this and structured data in general, I would definitely recommend checking out Google's search gallery to get the code. And if you wanna test the code, going to Google's rich results test. The next question I wanna ask here is what's gonna help us maximize conversions? We wanna make sure we're not only ranking better and getting more traffic, but that we're funneling that traffic to the right places. So one of my main tips here is just adding call to actions. So tip number one, I always like to make sure that there is a call to action. Tip two is to make sure that that call to action has clear and compelling messaging. Spend a little extra time on this. I would also try multiple placements. So instead of just having a CTA at the end, I'll try one a little bit higher up on the page too. I personally also like to be mindful of funnel stage. So for example, when I'm reading a top of funnel blog post, I personally find it a little bit jarring and a little too salesy to see a buy now or schedule a demo CTA when I'm just reading for information or inspiration. So I like to take my top of funnel articles and do CTAs that are like top of funnel kind of gated pieces or link those to mid funnel assets and then take my mid funnel assets and use those to link to bottom funnel offers. It's just a little bit more of a natural way to lead people down your funnel. And then the last tip is to make the offer relevant. This is probably common sense, but I think it's worth mentioning. You can see here on the right that the future of retail 2021 download this report, that's our CTA. And the topic of the blog is omnichannel trends to look for in 2021. It should come as no surprise that this CTA gets clicked on quite a bit. And it's because of how relevant that offer is to the topic of the page. Okay, so we're at the final step of this process and that's iteration. And that's really here to underscore the fact that the refresh process is never really done. Typically what we find is that we'll publish a refresh and we see really quick gains, which is awesome. This is a real example of a refresh that we published recently and we saw a 207% gain in month over month traffic, which is fantastic. And then we get excited, we wanna check our total, our total site traffic month over month. And then we're met with something like this, where we're left wondering, why on earth are we still stagnating? Why are we doing a little bit worse even? This is the point I always need to remind myself that SEO is a lot like owning a car. Even when your car is paid off, you're still gonna need to spend time and money on regular maintenance. Your old decaying traffic is constantly working as a traffic detractor and your new and refresh content is typically acting to add traffic to your totals. And those two things are constantly working against each other, which is why it is so important to prioritize refreshes. So if you come away with nothing else, come away and remember these three main steps to the process. And that's number one, make a habit of identifying posts where your position and traffic have been declining over time. Tip two is to make sure you get the table stakes right when you're executing these, but then go above and beyond and build a moat by including things like expert quotes and FAQ schema. And number three, keep iterating. Remember that content requires constant maintenance if you want it to keep bringing in that free traffic to your site. Thank you.