Fresh Content and Design

There’s still a big belief in “set it and forget it” in marketing. It comes from the belief that content is what it is, and can’t be improved.

In fact, content must be improved based on observations and data.  It’s sad that marketing managers don’t understand that and they delete old content outright which destroys its value forever. We need to have a passion for our content because it represents our company and its mission. Old content isn’t dying, it’s getting better.

In reality, old content can be expertly, even completely overhauled to present a fresh, new experience for visitors.  Analytics research has shown that old blog posts, for instance, produce the most leads. With age, they earned credibility, citations and backlinks which increased traffic.

They became a force, which Google is attuned with. If Google wants the most trusted, immersive and lasting resource you have, then why not take care of it? Treat it like a family heirloom or a vintage car.  And when you refresh your old content with purpose against important, relevant keywords, topics, and a content strategy, it becomes very powerful.

The Value of Fresh

Just like a fresh salad, fresh content has a zesty, nutritious taste to readers. It creates increased impact, engagement, and retention, and can generate a strong impulse to buy.  For a traveler or tour trip buyer, freshly updated details, stories, photos, videos, and descriptions with current references, perhaps some new tour features make them sit up and pay attention. And they feel more confident about your offering.

It’s just like after I eat one of my massive Kale salads, I’m confident that the ingredients will make me very healthy, more intelligent and a better athlete, which I believe they have!  There are powerful, vital nutritional ingredients in the fresh salads that few people even know about.  It strengthens and expands arteries so my heart doesn’t have to work so hard, and more oxygen and nutrients get where they’re needed fast.

Fresh is so good.  It gets ranking power and visitor attention where it’s needed for maximum marketing performance. So fresh can actually be an important focus for your content making it more effective in Google and more impactful, engaging and persuasive. Fresh matches your value proposition to traveler’s current intent.  Because, they’re intent this year is different than last year. Time marches on and they have different interests and intent.

One Million is Nice, But There’s Way More to It than That

I’ve produced several million visit blog posts. Think about that for a moment — 1 single blog post that created one million unique visitors. Engagement time on those posts was among the best too. Content that’s constantly on the right topic, issues, news, events, and benefits establishes itself as compelling, worth remembering, bookmarking and linking to.  It gathers powers as it goes — perpetually relevant and engaging.

Of course, it takes some time to establish a brand and a content page on Google. But time-to-success depends on your effort and commitment. If you want it, it will happen. Because you’ll make it so.

Yes, old established content has to be refreshed, revitalized and sometimes repurposed. Our audience and the information/experience marketplace changes. And sometimes old content just burns out from over-exposure. And that’s my cue to create a new angle, a new experience, for readers. It’s the same for YouTube videos.  A successful asset should never be neglected.  It has powers beyond your disbelief.

A content refresh is a complete redrafting, restrategizing, and fresh presentation to resonate with travel company’s big challenge today — staying relevant to the travel market.

Because when content goes stale, it’s not relevant anymore. And that makes it a poor experience, with no hope to captivate, motivate and persuade your visitors.

And travel management software companies, tour marketplaces, and travel tour agencies don’t want to see themselves fading from view online  So, let’s “respect fresh.” Enjoy this exploration into freshness and how to be strategic in enriching, focusing, and remaking your content to be awesome.

Google Really Likes Fresh Content

With respect specifically to SEO, Google has done extensive revisions of its ranking algorithm and of the content/links contained in their massive Terrabyte-sized database.

They’ve done housecleaning of recent and they’re using AI to downgrade outdated content and backlinks.  Refreshed content has the best power to create new backlinks. There is a lot in Google’s algorithm that relates to freshness. I take care of all this for you so you’re spared the advanced SEO details.

Freshening up and sharpening the ranking power of all those old pages delivers a ranking boost, and I know how to do ranking power shaping to get the best results.  I’ve been doing that for decades. That’s an important advanced SEO technique, which is important because Google/Bing will be driving most of your traffic and leads.

There’s more to marketing than Google however.

Refreshing Content for a Powerful Product and Brand Experience

Beyond SEO, is the whole matter of presenting a fresh, updated content and brand experience to your audience. Our real purpose is to deliver them into a fantastic online experience that will impact, engage, and persuade.  Ultimately, we need to build relevance, preference with powerful content experiences that generate a sale.

One delicate point I must mention if I could, is that just maybe, your current content sucks. If you measure it against the quality criteria and content strategy I cover in my blogs, you might recognize its weaknesses.  Market-leading content isn’t just scraped up off of ChatGPT, or whisked together from thoughts and experiences, and promotional needs.

It requires thoughtful construction and much editing.

It’s actually challenging to develop a content strategy that presents your value proposition well and makes you the preferred choice of travelers. I find it very challenging to build a strategy that beats the major travel corporations. What they have is great writers, resources, connections, business partners, suppliers, content assets and time. They know all of this travel content strategy, impact and engagement stuff I’m talking about here, and they have the financial resources and staff to put it together to win.

You must achieve this on a smaller budget of course. But it won’t happen unless you understand the challenge of it, and which techniques will help you win. Then with this confidence, you can invest fully in it (and my services), knowing you’re on the right track, and success isn’t far off.

From Credibility to Vibes

Being current as they say is important to everything your business does. If travelers think you’re out of touch, that you aren’t up on the destinations and travel management right now, they lose confidence. Your credibility falls, and then they’re not getting the feel good vibes they want before they buy. They buy the promise of the joy of travel, and the power of their trip to deliver all those wonderful things they want.

Fresh content shows you’re on top of it with great descriptions, narratives, visuals and benefits that are available now. And when you tell them what’s going to happen next in their beautiful adventure, that’s the icing on the delicious chocolate cake that’s making them salivate!

There’s another important point too about being out of date — the voice, topics, angles, images, treatment, audience, and narratives can be out of date too. You’ll need to update your pillar blog posts and a cluster of supporting content pieces that show you’re really up on the latest on your trips and destinations.  And up to date meaningfully for your specific high value audience.

Yes, this is a lot of work, but we choose assets carefully via analytics, and do what we what we can with the time and resources available.  I think you’ll be glad to have me handle this complicated matter.  Saving you stress, headaches, and confusion is a big part of my value proposition.

What Needs to be Refreshed?

Let’s talk about refreshing in a more global sense with several elements in play.

Your analytics reports will show the decline of outdated content, and we can investigate why it’s no longer performing. It’s likely not one thing. With respect to Google rankings and traffic, it’s often a cluster of ranking strengths on some important keyword topical themes that have weakened.

It may be your content pieces don’t respond to what Google now believes is essential in that content topic. We’ll need to explore the topic deeply to understand what is that Google believes is critical to that conversation. It might be specific discussions, a range of subtopics, or references to top authorities and experts, or key news stories. We have to hit the nail on the head.

It could be your order of topic presentation.  If you’ve used ChatGPT or DeepSeek, you know they have a preference for the orderly presentation of everything in an article. We may need to refigure the flow of ideas and experiences in the articles/pages.

Sometimes, you don’t have relevant backlinks or you’ve lost good backlinks.  Because you didn’t keep your content current, some publishers decided to drop the link to your page. Sometimes, other SEOs pay to have their link inserted instead.

And for that keyword theme you may lack supportive content on your site that shows your authority/credibility/depth on the topic. And given the role of AI, your content might not speak in the right tone of voice or style that matches that theme (e.g., seriousness and vocabulary for medical topics).

AI is a pain, because it’s being used to reinterpret our content for ranking assessments. This is why many are saying SEO is dead. But it isn’t as long as you are aware of how AI is interpreting your content, and you’re creating great content.

Other times still, it’s search volumes that have disappeared, so your old post needs to have a new keyword focus.

Aside from Google, content needs to be repurposed to match current user intent, the current marketplace, along with its visual impact (images, scannable layout, article structure), visitor engagement, and persuasiveness.

Let’s take a big picture view of refreshment, and how we can make content renewal carry much more impact as a whole.

• is your blog design and layout serving your brand well? — make it more lively, visual, not distracting and bring out key points in your content. This will require a good blog designer to make these changes in layout and what content pieces would be shown.
• are you providing truly interesting, unique information on your topics — which involves new destinations, people, experiences that add to the main message of the article
• focus on your topics/theme/keywords for the article and your site overall — remember that changes to your key posts could reduce your content relevance to Google
• try a new angle on your topic/theme and a new storyline hook — bring readers back into the topic in a new, interesting way that presents your UVP in a fresh new light
• use new supporting stories, characters, and experiences  — make it more relevant to new demographics (because the travel audience is changing, and maybe your audience is weakening)
• use new photos of destinations, travels, people and events — proving people still prefer your tours/products/packages and allow a new group of people to read, comment and provide social proof of the value of your products.
• freshen up your overall content, traffic and branding strategy – really good content supercharges your value proposition.

Developing great travel content is no easy task. But from the start, you should have a well-conceived content strategy guiding development.

Gord Collins is an innovator and visionary in the art/science of content strategy and SEO. And we should remember, whether for branding or content pieces, we don’t always have to be the best, but rather to be “the only one they’ll ever want.”