Search has changed a lot over the past two years. So many of the questions we get from clients are talking about “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization), “AEO” (Answer Engine Optimization), “AIOs” (Google’s AI Overviews), LLM-based search, Zero-Click search, and any other acronym you can think of.
I’m not shocked by this, and they should be asking these questions. The problem is only asking what new content we should write to “please” the AI search engines, and drive more users down the funnel to hopefully increase leads.
After years of managing SEO strategies across many different industries, I’ve seen a common “strategy” happen over and over again when onboarding a new client. Most websites don’t have a content creation problem; they have a content quality problem.
I believe that too many people are relying on AI-written content and only publishing new content, not thinking about the fact that a blog they wrote years ago brought in quality leads for a full year.
So this past year, instead of pushing out new blogs constantly to achieve the “recent” bias of today’s search landscape, we focused entirely on rewriting and improving existing blogs on our website, and here’s what happened.
The SEO Advantage of Rewriting Existing Content
With how fast search is changing, it seems like the basic idea to stay competitive that is continually pushed is:
“Publish more content at a quicker rate.”
I would disagree with this. Most of the websites that I see have a massive amount of underperforming content and a potential 1 or 2 blogs that perform well for a short period of time. The true breakdown of my content audits generally shows:
- Blogs ranking for keywords on page two or three, and not many have any SERP features (Search Engine Results Page features)
- Blogs with outdated information and very thin sections
- Blogs with poor content structure and outdated/weak internal linking
- Blogs with content that isn’t written for the search intent of users, but to try to only drive leads
To be honest, a lot of our older blogs fell into one or more of those bullet points. So the question most people don’t think about is:
“Why not build off of the existing authority you already worked for?”
The blogs you already have written likely fall into two buckets:
- It could potentially have backlinks, ranking keywords, internal linking, and relevance, and you might only be missing recency, and/or it is written poorly.
- It is not a relevant topic for what you’re looking to build authority around.
Instead of keeping them and just creating new content, use what you have to build the recency and quality of content.
How to Rewrite Your Blog Content For Results
As I mentioned before, the goal is to build off historical data/authority, improve quality, and improve recency. Now, to many, that might sound like only needing to change a few paragraphs, change any mention of the year to the correct year, and you’re good to go.
It’s not that easy. What you should focus on when looking to rewrite old blogs to help improve results today is:
1. Reworking Blog Sections
The simple goal here is to rework any and all sections of your blog to better match the search intent of the user. Whether that is rewriting the information you already have so it’s up to date or expanding it, you want someone who finds this content to feel like it’s truly written for the information they are looking for, not just to be salesy.
Look for any sections that don’t align with the question or topic you’re talking about and rewrite them.
2. Improve Content Structure
Old SEO content strategy talked a lot about making sure you write a certain number of words in your blogs and having long sections diving into a subtopic. The way to improve your content based on modern SEO is to think about how a user can easily get information quickly and dive into more if they want to.
If your old blogs have a lot of big blocks of text, look for ways to structure the content differently so that a user can easily scan for information. This could be:
- Utilizing bullet points more often
- Creating dropdowns that house more information
- Separating larger sections into smaller ones with H3s, H4s, etc.
- Adding graphics or data to convey your message in a very digestible way
The easier it is for a user to find what they are looking for, the more engagement you’ll continue to have because the less likely they’ll exit your blog right away.
3. Internal Linking Improvements
Whether you had 0 internal links on your old blog or 30, you likely have a lot of new pages or better external resources for users to gain information from.
Instead of shoving all information into one blog, you can easily hit on a topic briefly and then internally link to another piece of content that dives deeper into it. This does 3 different things:
- It allows users to “choose their own path” for where they want to go and what they want to learn
- It allows you to “push” users to the content they need to help them make a decision
- It passes authority from one piece of content to another
Internal linking can easily be overlooked, but the more you rewrite your content, the more you should be intentional about how you’re internally linking.
What Can Happen When You Choose To Rewrite Your Old Content
We’ve discussed rewriting your blogs and content vs. only writing new content, but now let’s get into what happened when we chose to focus only on rewriting our blogs this past year and how it impacted awareness, engagement, and conversions across our website.
1. Rewriting Content Improved Our Brand Awareness and Authority
Our website has always had a decent amount of content, but the trouble was our “authority” around topics like content marketing, local SEO, AI SEO, paid ads, and web design was not strong due to the fact that we spread our topics too thin.
Instead of picking our main topic clusters and diving deeper into them, we just wrote about anything and everything. When we picked what topics we wanted to be thought-leaders for, we started to build authority around them by having most of our blogs centered around one of the main topics that impacted not only our blogs but our website as a whole.
2. Keyword Rankings Improved
From January of 2025 to January of 2026, we saw a 140% increase in total keywords, a 48% increase in top 10 keywords, and a 1146% increase in SERP keywords across our entire website.
For our blog content only, we saw a 142% increase in total keywords, a 38% increase in top 10 keywords, and a 1542% increase in SERP keywords.
Lastly, our overall “awareness” on Google Search Console improved by 269% with over 5 million more impressions. (Note: this data point is a bit skewed due to changes in Google Search)
3. Rewriting Content Improved The Quality of Our Website Engagement, Which Led to More Conversions
The one data point that we saw dip year over year was our organic sessions. Now, if you live in the world of marketing (specifically SEO), you know that with how search is evolving with things like AI Overviews, you’ll just see fewer sessions to your website.
More users are finding the simple answers and/or information they are looking for without needing to click into your website.
The way that I now talk about organic sessions is that it’s less about the total number of sessions or engaged sessions and more about whether those users are eventually converting at a better rate than the year before.
Transparently, we saw an overall dip of organic sessions by roughly 50%.
This would normally be a huge red flag to anyone working at or owning a company.
Going back to my original thought: If you are seeing fewer organic users engage with your content, but are seeing more of these users convert, you should not go into alert mode.
Even with 50% less organic sessions, we saw an increase of 8% of organic website form submissions and had an increase of 7% of initial discovery calls. That’s still a win.
Think about that for a second…
If you were to look at your marketing data and say to someone, “I now have 50% less organic users coming to my website”, they would likely think that things are not trending in the right direction.
But when you focus on what truly matters and tell them, “But I have 7% more leads”, it should calm the nerves.
SEO Is Often About Improvement, Not Creation
To have a good content strategy, you should not only be looking forward, but you should also take time to look back at what content performed well, helped inform users, and increased the number of leads you were getting.
So many websites have “gold mines” when it comes to blogs or content that they let burn out and never touch again, when in reality, those “old gold mines” are what they should be rewriting over and over and over again.