Boring Stuff: The Content Work No One Wants to Do, but Everyone Needs

Has it already been a year since the last time you updated that pillar piece? The freshness is fading, the information is outdated, and the post links to a webinar that happened six months ago.

The problem is, your team has a pile of new content marketing initiatives on their plate and new ideas they want to pursue. Call it shiny object syndrome if you want. But can you blame them?

Content updates, rewrites, and refreshes aren’t the most exciting marketing projects. They can be downright boring, in fact. Your in-house writers feel like they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day situation and content quality starts to suffer.

But it’s work that’s worth doing. Keeping things fresh is one of the fastest and most effective ways to give your content marketing program a boost.

Boring content marketing is work that compounds

You may not see a dramatic difference from refreshing one or two pieces on the company blog. But every article you update is a drop in the bucket that helps maintain your online visibility and topical authority.

Orbit Media’s annual study on blogging found that those who regularly update content are twice as likely to report strong results. Yes, it can be tedious. But if you ignore old content, it starts to rot. There’s even a name for this: content decay.

It’s kind of like working out: Content gets weaker the longer it sits there waiting for an update. Its muscles atrophy, which means someone needs to get in there and start doing the heavy lifting.

And just like exercising, shortcuts aren’t going to work.

Think you can just change the date on published content and call it a day? Think again. Google explicitly states that changing dates without substantially improving a page isn’t going to be helpful. That’s a somewhat shady tactic meant to manipulate rankings without adding value.

Fresh content may be even more important for AI visibility and AEO. Ahrefs research found that pages cited by AI assistants were about 26% fresher than pages appearing in traditional organic search results.

The point is, content updates can boost a struggling content marketing program and help a strong content strategy stay that way. Either way, maintaining the content you’ve already invested in can deliver a much better return than letting it age untouched.

The best ways to update your existing content

When you notice rankings, visibility, organic traffic, or conversions for key content starting to dip, there are several impactful ways to freshen things up.

Improve your hooks and CTAs

Start at the beginning and end of your content. Could the introduction be more compelling? Is the call-to-action pointing visitors to the right next step?

This kind of update is especially helpful if you have content that’s bringing in traffic but is underperforming. 

If GA4 shows too many people are bouncing, what can you update to keep people exploring your website? If the time on page is lower than you’d like, make sure your lead paragraphs draw them in and follow through on the headline promise that prompted people to click.

Freshen up visuals and branding

A brand refresh is another good reason to go through and update important content. That infographic no longer jives with the new style guide. Or you decided to stop using stock photography in hero images.

Brand names and how you refer to your business’s products and services can also change. Even if your team thinks it went through everything with a fine-toothed comb, random blog posts tend to be the place where things slip through. Content updates help you catch them.

These kinds of refreshes ensure that people who first encounter your brand through your content have a consistent experience.

Clean up outdated information

You’ll be surprised at how much gets stale over the course of a year. Some of the outdated information in your content marketing may have to do with your products and services. 

This is especially true in B2B SaaS where Product teams spend the year fixing bugs, adding features, and launching new solutions. Does existing content reflect that progress on the product roadmap?

When content that’s supposed to be evergreen mentions current events that are no longer current, it’s a clear sign to people that what they’re reading is old. Maybe there are even pop culture references that won’t land the same way they did a year ago. (RIP 6-7 jokes)

You may also want to update bylines in content for employees or experts who’ve left the company.

This kind of cleanup isn’t just cosmetic. Outdated information on your website can cast doubt on everything else. Keeping everything up-to-date protects your brand’s credibility.

Add fresh statistics

The data and stats you feature in your content are among the most important things to keep fresh. If you regularly cite trusted industry research, pay attention to when the new version comes out and update your content to reflect those findings.

If your company conducts its own original research or has access to valuable benchmark data, that’s an excellent way to refresh existing content.

Put together a collection of the biggest findings and interesting data. Then, identify the piece of content where those statistics can support the points you’re making and topics you’re covering.

Update internal links

Your team spent the last year publishing new content, but do older, related posts connect readers to that information?

An internal linking strategy is one of the more underrated tactics for increasing search engine and AI visibility. Google’s documentation on AI states that helpful internal linking is a best practice for traditional SEO, as well as for showing up in AI Overviews (AIOs).

The jury is still out on how other AI systems will use links within content. However, a study on link-aware retrieval augmented generation (LARAG) found that AI systems that are “link aware” were more likely to generate high-quality answers.

“These results show that directly leveraging the existing hyperlink topology of technical documentation, even without explicit graph construction or inference, enables an implicit form of graph-like retrieval that yields a more faithful and efficient RAG pipeline, providing better grounding at lower cost.”

Put simply, this suggests that link awareness could be coming to an LLM near you.

Include new SME insights

One of the best ways to improve content quality is to bring in your company’s experts and thought leaders.

An expert review can reveal ways to make existing content stronger. Plus, you can turn a generic blog post into something memorable with insightful quotations and stories from people who really know their stuff. 

These are the kinds of content updates that build trust and authority, which means they’ll earn you mentions, citations, and backlinks too.

Transform old-school SEO content with a real POV

That brings us to one of the biggest challenges for content teams right now. The SEO-focused content that used to bring in droves of organic traffic just isn’t working like it used to.

This challenge stems from the fact that most general knowledge is now part of the training data for LLMs like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. So, if your existing content explains the basics, there’s a good chance more people will get their answers from AI instead of your brand’s blog.

The 101-level blog posts with definitions and simple explainers are now considered commodity content. So, what qualifies as non-commodity content?

Google has been pushing for what it calls E-E-A-T content for years now. Now’s the time to actually get serious about content marketing that shows Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

If you take a close look at some of the content your team optimized for search, it’s likely you’ll find a ton of information and plenty of keywords, but no real point of view.

While it takes some strategic effort, you can rework keyword-focused content into articles with an original POV. A real opinion on the topic makes your content stand out from all the ultimate guides and glossary entries out there.

The advantage of a beginner’s mind for content updates

So, we’ve established how important content updates are to your strategy. But we haven’t addressed the problem of it being a drag for your already-overworked marketing team.

Blue Ivory specializes in stepping in to take over the drudgery of this boring work.

To us, it’s not boring at all. That’s because we’re bringing a fresh perspective to your existing content. It’s the benefit of a “beginner’s mind.”

That doesn’t mean we’re novices. It means our writers are curious and ready to dig in, learn, look for new angles, and reveal what your team has gotten too close to see.

Nothing freshens up existing content like a new perspective. In the meantime, your team gets to move on to the next big project while Blue Ivory helps you maintain what you’ve already built.

Plenty of our clients have content audits telling them what needs to be done. They call on us when they need someone to roll up their sleeves and finish the job. 

Find out more about how we help with Content Audits and Refreshes. Or get in touch with Blue Ivory today and let’s get to know each other.