Updating Existing Content

Start With Why

Set the context of the content update.

Going into this, why are we updating it to begin with?

This could be a whole range of things including but not limited to:

1. A user followed a process in a tutorial, and there was something wrong with a specific step.
2. The content started to decline in traffic/position in search.
3. Overall content review, update to our current standards + refresh to ensure it is up to date.

The approach that you are going to take and the parts of this documentation you need to focus on will differ based on why we are updating it to begin with.

If the why is not clear in the Asana task, please ask if it is needed, after first taking the initiative based on reviewing the post and using the fact that you have access to identify why it may need an update.

Technical & On-Page Checks

General

1. Title
2. Permalink: Only update the permalink if you are able to implement a 301 redirect from the previous permalink to point to the new page
3. Meta title
4. Meta description
5. The blog post introduction
6. The conclusion

Links

1. Are the external resources that we are linking to all ones that match the type of content that we would link to?
2. Are there any broken links?
3. Are we missing out on any internal linking opportunities?

Media

1. Do we have images that add value to the content?
2. Do all of our images have optimized image alt text?
3. Do all of our images have useful filenames?
4. Do we have any YouTube videos embedded? If not, is there a reasonable opportunity to create video content surrounding this topic?
5. If there is a video, do we have the necessary video schema on the page?

General Content Quality / Standards

Ask yourself: does this meet our standards for content quality?

This is not a checklist. This is a qualitative assessment of dozens of things including your understanding of our internal content quality standards.

As a starting point … these include:

1. Does this post address the search intent/user intent of someone reading this article?
2. Are we missing any important information that may be useful to a searcher? (and if this content update stems from a decline in traffic, compare our content to what’s in SERPs and evaluate whether we are missing something that other content that ranks better than us has).
3. Is our introduction/hook instantly clear what the article is about, ideally including the target keyword if possible to achieve this contextually?

Note: These are merely a starting point.