Sitting on a ton of old articles that are well past their “best before” date?
This case study covers a project we’re still actively working on that started from the exact same place—a content library built up over half a decade that was losing it’s thunder.
Find out how we’ve already turned the ship around in only 4 months—including winning 14 featured snippets with one asset in less than a month.
Company
The client runs two business models in parallel—a product manufacturing agency and a SaaS-based product development marketplace.
They work with product teams and physical product developers primarily based in the US and help them build products using offshore production, manufacturing, and supply chain logistics partners.
Problems
1. Old content going stale.
They were sitting on a mountain of old content that was below average in terms of quality, but still hovering between position 40-80 for some highly relevant terms in the Google search results.
2. Over-reliance on PPC.
The overwhelming majority of their inbound demo and consultation requests were coming from Google Ads campaigns that were starting to get too expensive. They needed to turn on another inbound tap.
Solution
Because they already had 100’s of existing articles that were somewhat “on the map” in Google—just not where they needed to be—we decided to focus first on content optimization and content refreshes.
Here’s what we did:
Part 1: Research & strategy
- Reviewed their current site analytics to see which types of pages convert best.
- Reviewed current rankings to see which articles were in striking distance.
- Built an initial content refresh roadmap with ~30 priority topics.
Part 2: Content production
- Started to refresh pages from the roadmap.
- Rewrote intros and entire sections to level up the assets.
- Added brand new sections to fill contextual gaps vs the market.
- Compared our articles to the top ranking pages to spot glaring holes.
- Updated page titles to be more click-friendly and within character targets.
Part 3: Publishing, tracking & reporting
- Staged and published revised versions quickly.
- Kept URL paths that were relevant & had authority the same.
- Updated URL paths that were too long, irrelevant, or just clunky.
- Added 5+ internal links each from other high-authority pages on the site.
- Tracked daily rankings for each new page across 5-10 priority search terms.
- Reported on traffic gains AND assisted conversions compared to the old versions.
Results
Through 6 months of work we achieved the following:
25 published content refreshes
14 featured snippets earned with a single page with 0 backlinks
Pos 1-3 rankings up 40% since day 1
Organic sessions to pages we refreshed up 170% since day
