By updating content, you show Google that it is accurate and up-to-date. In this presentation, I have detailed out how to sort content pieces for refreshing.

1. Refreshing Content For SEO
Gains

2. Why do we need to refresh a
blog post?
Apart from evergreen blog post content, all other
blog posts have a shelf life, after which it gets
outdated. For an organization to ensure
consistent traffic to all its blogs, plans for
refreshing the content based on the shelf life is a
must.
As all know, it helps get a good score on Google
freshness parameters.
The justification for ranking fresh content and
accepting freshness as a ranking signal of all
content can be very well deduced from the
example cited in the Search Engine Journal

3. “Someone searching for “Taylor Swift boyfriend” will likely want to
know the current person she is dating.
Therefore content time/date stamped yesterday, with lots of social
shares, engagement, and backlinks over the past few hours, will likely
displace prior ranking content which has not been updated, or
providing the same activity freshness signals.”- SEJ

4. The important question is to decide which blogs to refresh for SEO
gains.

5. Blogs Having A Lower Shelf Life
-The shelf life even depends upon the domains of the blogs.
- The shelf life of blogs is lowest in technology domains and highest in literature
and art domains. All literary and artistic renaissance and updates occur in a long
period of time.
- But, in the case of technologies, the update is too frequent, hence the shelf life is
too low.
So, for an organization to create a plan for consistent traffic to all its blogs, the
content refresh urgency based on domains, must be taken into consideration.

6. HighTraffic Blogs
It should be noted that almost 80% of the blog traffic comes from your
high traffic blogs which may constitute just 5- 10% ( or even lower) of the
total volume of your blogs.
Next, we need to consider the types of high traffic blogs. High traffic
blogs with evergreen content carry less urgency of refreshing, than high
traffic blogs with other types of content.

7. Pages with low rank but a good amount of reputed links
(Link-worthiness of blogs)
Certain blogs may rank low but they may carry a good amount of reputed
links, owing to the authority of content or
the in-depth information or perspectives dealt or usefulness for the linking
websites.
These pages should be high priority pages for refreshing.

8. Pages with handsome impressions, but low ranking
keywords
Pages that register a good amount of impressions but have lost
ranks
AND
Moved down the traffic chart owing to new keywords which are
higher ranking, must be kept as priority for refreshing.

9. Pages dealing with topics on which some new universal
update or news has arrived ( News-worthiness)
Example: If you have a blog detailing out ‘Ways to deal with pandemic’, the arrival of
Coronavirus and information related to that needs to be included, so that the blog
resonates with the present time users.
We need to take into account the news-worthiness of the topic for updating.
Now, you can get a good refresh score not just based on content but the freshness of
the links to the page.
If an old content of your links to reputed websites at present after updating, you are
gaining some freshness according to Google.

10. Pages with old byline dates
Now, it often happens that we change a certain portion of the blog or add
some value and go on doing minor updation, but we forget to change the
byline date.
It is an important signal of freshness more to your readers.
While searching with a query “ The AI technology’, you may get multiple
results.
But often, we tend to click on the one which has a recent date.

12. Blogs having a very less bounce rate but minimum page
views
Certain blogs are so informative or worthy that readers just cling to it,
once they reach the page.
Hence, they have minimum bounce rates and high dwell time, but
simply these blogs don’t have enough SEO juice to rank up the search
engines.
These blogs with a little SEO effort like refreshing the content( making
it more valuable) etc and through proper sharing and distribution can
act as flagship, high traffic earning blogs.

13. Title,Tags Refreshing
Now meta tags, titles, and headings are the most delicious recipes for
search bots to rank your page for.
So, periodically, all the titles must be made catchy, eye-grabbing, and
relevant traffic fetching keywords must be induced.
Note: If you don’t have time to change or resources to change the entire
content, you can at least change the meta title, descriptions, headings,
and sub-headings periodically, to indicate freshness.