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Updating an already-published page can be faster than trying to rank a new piece of content from scratch.
If your website SEO strategy is focusing on publishing new content, I need you to stop what you're doing and do this instead. So I recently did an SEO audit for a client that noticed their website traffic had dropped off a cliff over the last year. And as part of this audit, I was analysing the pages that had seen the biggest traffic drops.
And they all had one thing in common.
Actually make that two things. The first, they were all blog posts. But the second, which is the most important bit, was that they were published in 2024.
And up until 2025, when Google rolled out an algorithm update, they were doing super well and bringing in loads of traffic.
Now the update that massively changed this for them was a spam update. After the update, like always, the SEO community analysed it and found that there were certain sites that were impacted the most by this. There were quite a few things they found within this.
Like they were low authority sites, publishing 100% AI generated content.
I tell you guys all the time not to do this, but the thing that stuck out to me, that is definitely what happened with this site is that their content was out of date. And Google started favouring fresher content after the update, that content was already a year out of date and now it's 2 years out of date and In the meantime, all of their competitors have been updating or publishing new content around these topics that was ranking, whereas they were focusing on just publishing new content on different topics.
Feel like you probably know where I'm going with this.
Stop publishing new content and go over your old content. Start out with anything that's over a year old. Check if it's ranking, check if it's bringing traffic, see if there's been a decline, and most importantly, see what currently is ranking.
Because this content has already been published on your site, if you can update it and get it ranking or improve its rankings, it's gonna take you way less time than getting a new piece of content to rank.
Thank me later.
Updating an already-published page can be faster than trying to rank a new piece of content from scratch.
Before commissioning new SEO content, audit older posts for traffic decline, compare current ranking pages, and refresh the pages that already have history.
Because this content has already been published on your site, if you can update it and get it ranking or improve its rankings, it's gonna take you way less time than getting a new piece of content to rank.
Base2026 attributes this public source record to @webhivedigital, published 2026-06-09, with the original platform link and correction/removal path kept on the page.