Content planning usually starts with a question about volume: how many new pieces this month. But once a site has thirty-odd articles, updating often beats writing. A new piece has to be crawled, assessed and work its way into a position from nothing; a page already appearing in search only has to be pushed a little further up a position it already holds. The starting lines are not the same.
That does not mean any old page will do. There is an order, and you can read it straight off your search performance report.
When updating beats writing
Three conditions have to hold together. The page already gets impressions — meaning the search engine has connected it to a query. The subject is still current. And you genuinely have more to say. Miss any one and a new piece is the better use of the hour, especially the third: start an update with nothing to add and it degenerates into reshuffling sentences and stamping a new date on top.
First priority — pages sitting just below the fold
Start with queries where you already appear but hardly ever get clicked: the rows whose average position hovers around the edge of the first page. That band means the search engine has already accepted your page as a candidate for the query and something decisive is missing.
The routine is straightforward. Filter to the query, confirm which page is being shown for it, then run the search yourself and put your page beside the results above you. One or two sub-topics almost always appear that everyone else covers and you do not. Those one or two are the missing thing.
One trap to watch for: if two of your own pages alternate for the same query, that is not an update problem but cannibalisation. The fix is to merge them and 301 the weaker address to the survivor, not to improve both in parallel.
Second priority — plenty of impressions, almost no clicks
On the same screen, look for rows with healthy impressions and an unusually low click-through rate. Here the problem is not the article but the part of it that appears in the results. Nobody read your page and left; nobody came in.
Three things to check. Does the title answer something other than what the query asks? Is the meta description empty, leaving the engine to cut an arbitrary sentence out of your body text? Does the date shown alongside look badly out of date? All three can be fixed almost without touching the article, which makes this the fastest-returning refresh of the lot.
Third priority — pages whose facts have expired
Version numbers, prices, admin menu names, screenshots, terms and conditions. These go stale quietly. Stale facts damage trust before they damage rankings: when what the reader sees on screen contradicts what the page says, every other sentence on it becomes suspect too.
The genuinely dangerous case is an old article describing your own terms. If your pricing or scope has changed and a two-year-old post still states the old arrangement, that stops being a content problem and becomes an argument during an enquiry. Build the habit of searching for mentions of a term whenever that term changes.
Four things not to do while refreshing
Do not change the URL. The whole benefit rests on what that address has already earned, and changing it forfeits exactly that. If a change is genuinely unavoidable, 301 the old address to the new one without exception.
Do not just restamp the date. Marking a page as updated when nothing changed misleads the reader and buys very little in search. When you really have added something, though, showing a modified date is worth doing.
Finally, do not do too many at once. Edit thirty pages in the same week and when the numbers move a month later you will have no idea which change moved them. Work in batches of about five and read the result before starting the next batch.
Grouping and linking articles into one structure is covered in the designing a content hub series, and the underlying rules on indexing and duplication live in the SEO archive. If the cleanup also involves URLs and redirects, that is handled alongside the technical SEO review in our optimization program.