Basking in the Traffic Gains: Our Content Refresh Early Detection System
I’ve made two posts this year about content refreshes. One was about traffic recovery, and the other was about refresh identification. Both of them were, admittedly, fairly wonky. I got lost in my SQL statements and graphs and invited you to come along for that ride with me, if you dared.
Not today, though. Today is the day that I heed the demand, “In English, poindexter!”
I’m going to show off the easy button for refreshing content and realizing substantial traffic gains. I can now do this because I’ve turned my queries and graphs into a dead simple, prioritized list of content to refresh. You can explore it for yourself here (click “refresh candidates”), and this is what it looks like.
This is a screenshot from the alpha offering of our content performance monitoring dashboard, which I announced back in June. (Beta coming soon!) The dashboard here features our content lab and community site, Make Me a Programmer.
If you’re unclear on what a content refresh is or why you should do it, let me explain. A content refresh involves making updates to an existing post or article on your site. As for why you should do it, let me present an actual anonymized field study of the impact on traffic (refreshes executed on this group of URLs at the red dot).
If you’re sold on the concept, I’ll spend the rest of the post explaining how we help you do it, using our tooling and refresh-candidate identification methodology.