Anatomy of a Content Refresh

Hello, welcome to another episode of Blog Roast, and today we're going to be talking about this article, "The Anatomy of a Content Refresh," submitted to me by the Verblio team, a wonderful content marketing agency. A really good starting point for evaluating any piece of content is to work out if this is doing something positive for the company that published it. In this case, the answer is a resounding yes. This article passes the ultimate test of content marketing and is very useful for their business.

As a content marketing agency, one of the biggest challenges we face is getting companies to think of us as more than just the providers of new blog posts. It's better for both us and the customer to have an ongoing relationship where we are involved across the entire lifespan of their content. Content refreshing, talking about that, framing that narrative, and explaining why we should be hired to support updating old content is a fantastically financially useful thing to do. It's one of the best bits of content any agency can publish.

So, through that lens, this is a huge successful article. I love it, and I think everyone dealing in content marketing should have some kind of thought or narrative around content refreshing, historical optimization, or whatever you want to call it. But, this is Blog Roast, and in the spirit of making all of us better at our jobs, I want to talk about three things I would potentially change or keep in mind if I were to update or write a new version of this post.

The three things I want to discuss are delivering on the promise created by your title, the structuring of articles to make them mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and the issue of weasel words that often creep into writing.

Let's focus on the structure of "The Anatomy of a Content Refresh." The table of contents reveals a couple of minor problems. While it's recommended to have a table of contents for any long article, there are some issues with the headings. The sections labeled "Identifying Content That Needs a Refresh" and "Prioritizing Content Refresh Work" seem to be subsets of the same topic and could be condensed. Additionally, the sections "Why You Should Do a Content Refresh" and "What Makes Content Ripe for a Refresh" could be streamlined since the focus should be on how to do it.

Moving on to the execution of the refresh, this part should be the substantive and largest portion of the article. However, it is currently relatively brief and serves as more of a summary. The weighting of information is off, and it fails to go into enough detail where necessary.

This problem of insufficient detail leads to the use of weasel words in the article. Weasel words are phrases or sentences that seem helpful and illuminating but lack precision and usefulness when it comes to taking action. The article provides examples of weasel words like "content takes time to ramp up" and "tools like Screaming Frog can help you determine if the content is fully baked." It would be beneficial to provide more specific and actionable guidance in these areas.