How to use Pages to Refresh

How to quickly find opportunities to improve ranking + traffic from your existing articles

Purpose

The Pages to Refresh tool’s purpose is to help you identify opportunities to enhance existing articles, so that you can improve their quality and boost their ranking, while avoiding conflicting priorities such as keyword cannibalization.

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Pro-tip: When aiming to improve your ranking, focusing on "Almost Ranking" and "People Also Ask" sections will yield the highest impact.

Set Up

You will need to set up the following, which are available in your Integration Settings:

  1. Your CMS integrated so that your existing articles are imported into Letterdrop for editing.
  1. Google Search Console + Google Analytics, where we will draw traffic and ranking data from to help you prioritize articles for refreshing.

How To Use

Almost Ranking

The Almost Ranking section highlights articles that are close to appearing on the first page of Google (positions 6 to 20). These are articles you should further optimize to drive more traffic. By default, the “Only show target keywords” toggle will be off. This means that the positions will be guessed by the system based on a keyword in the “Keyword” column. For optimal accuracy, you should click the toggle to focus on the terms you’re trying to rank for.

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Pro-tip: If you don’t have keywords set for a majority of your articles on Letterdrop, you can follow these instructions to get them added.

Once the toggle has been adjusted to your desired setting, you can follow these steps to make improvements:

  1. Go down the list and identify articles you would like to improve
  1. Open each article by hovering over and clicking on the title below the “Page” column
  1. Use the SEO Optimizer in the blog editor to ensure that your article answers the search intent by getting to content parity and adding unique insights.
    1. You can also add Subject Matter Expert videos to meet Google’s EEAT criteria.
  1. Once you’re done, you can publish the changes. In the Pages to Refresh feature, you can click on the tick or cross to accept or ignore the recommendations. These buttons won’t make any changes- they’ll simply remove the recommendation.

Decaying Pages

Decaying Pages surfaces pages where your traffic is dropping. We'll display the traffic from 3 months ago compared to this month's.

Similar to Almost Ranking, you can follow these steps to make improvements:

  1. Go down the list and identify articles you would like to improve
  1. Open articles for editing by hovering over and clicking on the title in the “Page” column
  1. Use the SEO Optimizer to improve content and search intent.
  1. Once you’re done, you can publish the changes. In the Pages to Refresh feature, you can click the tick or cross. These buttons won’t make any changes- they’ll simply remove the recommendation.

Split Pages

As a general SEO best practice, each article should aim to rank for a keyword, or multiple keywords that share very similar search results. This section will help surface pages that rank for noticeably different keywords. This tool doesn’t have insight into your business context or customers, so you can use your best judgement to identify which articles have keywords they are ranking for that should be separated into a different article. You can follow these steps to make improvements:

  1. Go down the list and identify keywords you would like to create a separate article for
  1. Open the existing article by hovering over and clicking on its title in the “Page” column
  1. Run the SEO Optimizer on the keyword(s) you are trying to rank for to identify opportunities to answer search intent
  1. For separate keywords you’d like to create a new article for, you can open up a new blog editor, create a draft using the keyword, and edit.
  1. Once you’re done, you can publish the changes. In the Pages to Rfresh feature, you can click the tick or cross. These buttons won’t make any changes- they’ll simply remove the recommendation.

Keyword Cannibalization

This section will identify any pages that are competing for traffic on the same keyword. We'll show you the percentage split in traffic so that you can consider making them more distinct from each other.

You can follow these steps to make improvements:

  1. Go down the list and identify articles that you would like to make more distinct from each other.
    1. You can copy and past the URLs to open in new tabs to see how the articles overlap and find ways to further differentiate them from each other.
  1. Open the article you wish to rank for the given keyword. This will typically be the page that has the highest % traffic for the given keyword, which you can open by clicking on the Title below the "Page" column.
  1. Run the SEO Optimizer using the given keyword to answer search intent, reach content parity, and find opportunities for information gain.
  1. Go to Website-> Posts and open the corresponding article to make edits that will differentiate it. You can also run the SEO Optimizer on it using a differentiated keyword.
  1. Once you’re done, you can publish the changes. In the Pages to Refresh feature, you can click the tick or cross. These buttons won’t make any changes- they’ll simply remove the recommendation.

Improve Distribution

This section will surface any pages that have higher average session times but are not in your top 30% of visited pages. You can use Internal Linking to build links to them, or distribute them via email, newsletter, ads, or LinkedIn.

People Also Ask

The People Also Ask section lists questions you can answer to get featured at the top of Google search, above other articles.

You can follow these steps to answer the questions in your articles:

  1. Optional: Use the filter in the top-right to sort articles by status:
    1. Answered and ranking
    2. Answered but not ranking
    3. Not answered.
    4. Usually, focusing on the last two will yield the most impact for ranking.

  1. Go down the list and identify articles you would like to answer the given PAA question for.
  1. You can click on the X to ignore or 'Answer.' Choosing 'Answer' will open your article in the blog editor, where a draft section will be automatically inserted to address the question.
  1. You can then decide whether to accept or ignore this suggestion. Ignoring it is also fine - perhaps you prefer to address it within an existing paragraph rather than adding a new section! You have the flexibility to incorporate the answer elsewhere in the article
 
 
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