The Power of an SEO Content Refresh: 268% Increase in Organic Clicks

What if I told you that, with some strategic optimizations, you can significantly increase organic traffic to a specific piece of content in just a few days?

The secret is in smart, ongoing content refreshing.

Content refreshing is a key tactic in Inflow’s search engine optimization strategy — and for good reason. Through strategic changes, we’ve helped our clients generate triple-digit increases in organic impressions, clicks, and traffic to existing pages, without the need to write and publish completely new content from scratch.

Today, we’ll share an example of that strategy in action, highlighting our SEO work with one retail client and how our personalized approach delivered results including a 268% increase in clicks and a 176% increase in impressions to the brand’s key content pages.

Keep reading for the full case study — or, if you want similar results for your website, schedule a free consultation with our team anytime.

Client Background

EarthKind is a retail brand that manufactures and sells plant-based pest control and pest prevention products. Products can be purchased on its eCommerce site, Amazon storefront, or in select brick-and-mortar stores across the United States.

EarthKind is a long-time Inflow partner, having first approached us for SEO consulting services in 2016. Since the spring of 2020, the brand has actively invested in its search engine optimization efforts, with a specific focus on strategic content creation and optimization.

With Inflow’s help, this long-term investment in high-quality SEO content marketing has helped build a blog library establishing EarthKind as an authoritative leader in its industry.

But, as all SEOs know, maintaining that status requires just as much work as creating it in the first place.

The Importance of Refreshing Content

Publishers are constantly flooding the internet with new content. In turn, Google’s algorithm is always reevaluating search engine rankings to serve the most helpful, most relevant selections to its users.

The result? Even the best content may eventually be replaced in the organic results by newer content that better meets users’ needs — which is why content refreshing is so important.

(For the uninitiated, “content refresh” is just a fancy way of saying “content update” or “content optimization.”)

A content refresh can be as basic or detailed as needed to properly update and optimize a piece of SEO content. Often, this will be determined by the age of your original content, the topic covered, current trends in the SERPs, and the time your SEO team allocates to the project.

At a minimum, when refreshing your content for SEO purposes, you should make sure to review and possibly update:

• Metadata (meta descriptions, meta titles)
• Headings and subheadings
• Inaccurate or outdated content (think statistics, dates, etc.)
• Internal links to other relevant content
• Broken links to external content
• Publish ****

Here at Inflow, our content refreshes include another key step: competitor analysis.

By reviewing the other landing pages ranking for a desired keyword, we identify the aspects that our content may be missing or where it can be improved. For example, if a competitor’s piece on types of mice includes photos, we know this is one item we need to add to our content during the refresh process.

This crucial step allows us to emulate (not copy!) the successful aspects of competing content, increasing the chances of our content being ranked higher in the SERPs. 

(When necessary, we also go to the next level by adding new, helpful content to the piece — crucial for adding authority to a site and further standing out from the existing competition.) 

Not sure where to start with your content refresh strategy? Download our free SEO Content Brief Template for help creating your optimization checklist.

How Often Should You Refresh Your Content?

We’ll use an old digital marketer favorite here: It depends.

Content that targets highly competitive keywords may need refreshing more often than that targeting less competitive keywords. Similarly, any content that focuses on timely topics may require more frequent refreshing to stay relevant and accurate.

To determine whether your website content needs refreshing, review your organic traffic trends. If you notice a decline in traffic to a particular URL on a month-over-month or year-over-year basis, it may be time to spiff up that content and republish it (using the existing URL).

That way, Google’s crawlers will see your updated content, which is crucial for achieving higher rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and any possible increases in organic click-through rates (CTRs), traffic, and conversions.

EarthKind’s Content Refresh Strategy

Refreshing content may seem like a small thing, but it plays a major role in generating organic traffic growth over the long term.

Below, we’ll outline a few of the tactics we’ve developed to guide brands like EarthKind to SEO success.

But, if you’re looking to improve your organic traffic through content refreshing, a personalized approach is the way to go. Learn more about the custom content marketing strategy that will drive the most growth for your website by scheduling a free consultation today.

AI Overview Optimization

Few things have upended the world of organic search in the last few years like the launch of Google’s AI Overviews.

The video below is hosted on YouTube. If you need assistance with viewing the video, please contact [email protected].

We’ve written at length about these AI-generated search results, but here’s the moral of the story:

While the look of AI Overviews in the SERPs and the number of queries they appear for is continually changing, they generally serve to address users’ searches in the results without requiring a click into content to learn more. They’re an advancement of Google’s ongoing march toward zero-click searches, reducing the levels of organic traffic that websites see.

Like with previously introduced featured snippets, SEO teams can strategically optimize for placement within the AI Overviews. 

And, since the launch of these overviews in May 2024, that strategy has been an instrumental part of our content refresh work for EarthKind — and with significant results to show for it.

Example 1

In July 2024, we reoptimized an older blog on EarthKind’s site (“How to Repel Mice”) using our proven content refresh process. After addressing all of the aspects mentioned above (and a few more that we consider secret ingredients for success), we republished the piece — and saw an immediate improvement in organic performance metrics.

In comparing the two-month period before and after optimizations were made, the URL generated an 87% increase in organic clicks and a 57% increase in organic impressions, as measured in Google Search Console.

Even better? The updated content earned a top listing in Google’s AI Overview for related queries, including a direct link to EarthKind’s blog.

Example 2

Just one month later in August 2024, we took a similar approach to another popular content piece: “Where Mice Can Climb, Jump, & Fit in a Home.”

After republishing, the results rolled in even faster — and at a more significant rate, including a 268% increase in organic clicks and a 176% increase in organic impressions, comparing the same two-month pre- and post-update periods.

And, thanks to our strategic approach, EarthKind earned another top listing for a highly competitive target keyword, with an included link to boot.

Image Optimization

Many content refresh how-to guides out there focus on written content. And while that’s integral to success, we’d argue that the multimedia you use to support your written content can be just as useful, especially with Google’s new AI Overviews.

Since their first introduction in the spring of 2023, AI Overviews have frequently featured images and other visual content. To target those listings and featured snippets, our SEO team has added multimedia content to our content re-optimization checklist.

But this visual format isn’t just for aesthetics. It often serves an educational purpose, expressing the topics covered in the written copy in a concise way — one that aligns well with what Google tends to show in the AI-generated SERPs.

See the example below, in which we added a step-by-step infographic for how to dispose of a dead mouse, an addition that earned EarthKind an inclusion in both the AI Overview and the featured snippet for the top related query:

Improve your images’ chances of showing up in the Google SERPs by following our image SEO best practices.

Writing New Content vs. Refreshing Old Content

Of course, refreshing your old content is only one piece of the SEO puzzle. To continue enhancing your authority within your industry, you also need to produce new content that fills any gaps in your coverage.

Many marketing teams balk at the resources required to produce in-depth content on a regular basis or lean heavily on AI tools like ChatGPT to take care of writing that new content for them. 

But even the smallest investment in ongoing, original content marketing can make a huge difference in your long-term SEO performance.

EarthKind’s efforts are a great example. By building up its E.E.A.T. authority in its industry and continually refreshing existing content, the brand has established a powerful foundation as a content leader — which means almost any new web page published sees fairly immediate rankings for relevant keywords, as evidenced by the growth trajectory shown below, from a new blog published in July 2024.

Just a few months after publishing, it’s already generating triple-digit clicks and quadruple-digit impressions, all thanks to EarthKind’s ongoing commitment to sustainable, white-hat SEO initiatives.

It’s this multi-pronged content strategy that continues to deliver significant results for EarthKind’s website, year after year since our partnership first began.

Start Refreshing Your SEO Content With Inflow’s Help

We won’t lie: For most websites, search engine optimization is a long game, one in which significant growth may not be realized for six to 12 months after starting.

But, once the foundation is there, future growth opportunities will become easier to achieve, as evidenced by the quick turnaround EarthKind’s blog sees after strategic content refreshing.

If you’re struggling to generate growth with your blog, or you want to recover organic traffic lost over the last few months, a content refresh may be the perfect solution. 

Inflow’s SEO team can help you maximize your investment by identifying the biggest opportunities for improvement, implementing our proven refresh strategy, and creating a long-term growth plan for your website, regardless of your industry.

Learn more about our content refresh packages or request a custom marketing strategy proposal for your site by scheduling a free digital marketing consultation today: