When should I start Auditing/Rewriting Content that didn't rank?

[Josh Saga]

Hello dears and darlings and sirs and mamsirs,

Let's say you have a site that's a fresh domain of only 4 months - and you have 50 articles published since month 1.

Now, 30 of those articles made it to the top 100, within those 30 > 10 are in Page 1 > 20 are in Page 2-5. The other 20 left from the 50 are gone into oblivion.

Now lets say, for the sake of argument, have the time and money to rewrite the articles that didn't make it, the 20 articles and even those who did not make it to page 1> DO YOU REWRITE THEM NOW? or How long should you wait and see if it will reach the top 100?

Thanks,
Josh
xoxo

 

[ToffeeLa]

Lean into success.
Look at the articles ranked on the first page. Take the one with the highest traffic potential and do a deep dive on related keywords, people also ask, etc. Only use the words and phrases which are directly related to the initial ranking page (in other words, don't start talking about pet collars when the page is about special diets for older dogs).
Also look at other related kws that the page has got traffic for.
Expand the content with the closely related concepts. Look for opportunities for internal linking to that page and sections within that page. Look for backlinking opportunities for that page.
Repeat for other pages ranking on the first page.
Now start on the pages ranking 11-20.

Once you have done that, see if you can discern a pattern or cluster for the pages which are ranking. Research more phrases within that topical cluster or create more pages with the particular pattern.

 

[bernard]

If a piece of content doesn't rank, it doesn't have to be because it is bad, it can just as easily be that your content authority isn't good enough for that term. So the solution would be to create more posts around that topic.

 

[CCarter]

It could simply be your competition has more backlinks and authority for those articles target terms than you. Let's say everyone in the top 50 has at least 5 external backlinks, and all you did was publish, then what do you expect?

Rankings aren't in a vacuum, it's a zero sum game, someone has to lose in order for you to win.

You also said nothing about the traffic volume. It could be all the articles you didn't make it into the top 50 have 100k monthly searches and the others where you made it in have less than 1,000 month searches. That's a big missing piece of the puzzle.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Let's say you have a site that's a fresh domain of only 4 months

On top of what everyone else is saying, the quote above is another one of your issues. Google doesn't quite trust a 4 month old site like it does a 10 year old one or even a 1 year old one. If it did, the SERPs would be filled with spam. Over the next 8 months the throttle will be slowly but increasingly released and you'll start seeing the rest of these pages ranking.

In the meantime, I'd focus on more content, more links, improved technical SEO.

 

[bernard]

The more interesting to me is how you have a system for finding underperforming content.

Do you set up Google Analytics alerts?

Do you set off time every 3 months to check?

 

[PaulDragos]

It's also a question of how these articles were written, I suppose not very good, given that you want to rewrite them.

Also, you didn't mention anything about link building, how is it going there? If you started with 5 links per month, you could be doing about 10 a month by now, or is it that you didn't start yet?
especially given that you mentioned starting on a fresh domain