Refresh Interventions

Here is a list of refresh interventions and an explanation of what each involves, in alphabetical order, grouped by type of intervention. This is a non-exhaustive list of the things that we might do to a blog post upon which we're executing a content refresh, intended to improve rankings.

These are grouped into intervention types, which are, briefly:

Invisible Hygiene -- changes to the URL that are not visible or noticeable to the reader.
Visible Hygiene -- changes to the URL that are visible, but are minor in nature and have minimal impact on the sustance of the content.
Graphical -- changes that involve only adding or modifying graphics on the post or their captions.
Product Marketing -- changes that are focused on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and are designed to improve down-funnel metrics.
Technical -- changes that address the nuts and bolts of a tutorial or generally tradecraft information.
Editorial -- changes to the prose and substance of the content.

The reason for these explanations and categorization is that not all interventions are created equal in terms of client approval. Typically, clients don't want to sign off on, or even be aware of, hygiene changes, while they will want to be heavily involved in editorial changes. We call these things out separately in order to come to agreement with clients on the approval workflow for each kind of change. Approval patterns include

Execute -- we just do the intervention without seeking approval or talking about it with the client. Typical for hygiene.
Prototype -- we show the client what it will look like and get approval for the first one, then fall into execute posture. Typical for graphics and product marketing.
Approval -- we get sign off every time. Typical for editorial.
Avoid -- you don't want anyone doing this, approval or not.

Invisible Hygiene

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Add high-authority, non-competitive external links when none exist. Aside from the fact that this is a good user/reader experience, it helps on-page SEO by showing crawlers that you’re in the habit of referring to high authority sources to support your content. It also helps maintain a natural linking site profile, since most humans when creating content normally will tend to include links.
Add internal links. Especially when done strategically with URLs you want to rank, this helps distribute page rank to important pages, flatten your site’s crawl hierarchy and generally make your site more authoritative and crawlable.
Add links to any secondary properties. If you have more than one site, intra-linking among them is both natural and a way to boost the authority of both (all) sites.
Add valid alt text (with keyword if possible and makes sense). Alt text makes for a better reader experience, especially for folks using screen readers. But from an SEO perspective, having images related to your content and areas of topical authority is just another way to reinforce to crawlers what you’re talking about.
Change meta description. If appropriate, changing the meta description helps generate a larger diff graph and also gives you another chance to control what appears in the SERP, improving SERP experience for searchers. Generally applicable for meta descriptions too long or short, or if for whatever reason the search engines are ignoring the one you’ve specified.
Change meta title. Changing the meta title if current one is too long/short can improve SERP presentation and searcher experience, which has outsize importance for improving click through rates. Sometimes trying something new, even with a good working title, can make sense just for the sake of variety and novelty.
Open external links in new tabs. People have strong opinions about the UX of this either way, but I like doing this for external links only because it doesn’t take people off of your site when clicking a link (I’m also a personal fan of links defaulting to open in new tabs).
Remove excessive external links if they exist. External links are good. Too many of them looks weird to both crawlers and searchers and dilutes your page rank.
Remove or relink broken links. Broken links make life harder for the crawlers, and you definitely don’t want to do that So we’ll find a better alternative for any broken links (404s) or simply remove them, and for any redirects (301s), we’ll link to the target page.
Unlink/nofollow links to competing SERP entries. Occasionally you’ll see a situation where, for whatever reason, someone has linked to an article targeting the same keyword as the article we’re working on. A common example might be that the author of your “What is DevOps” post links to the Wikipedia page for DevOps. When that happens, we’ll either remove the link or if it’s contextually relevant, we’ll make it a nofollow link.

Visible Hygiene

Bold definitions when they might earn featured snippet/AI mention. Bolding or otherwise using semantic cues to highlight a definition can help crawlers (including for AI applications) be aware of exactly where in the post you’re defining a term. This in turn may prompt them to use it in some kind of SERP widget or, for AI tools, cite you.
Breakup "long" paragraphs. We generally insert line breaks when encountering paragraphs that are more than 3 sentences or that are just generally long in appearance. Searchers are more likely to hit back when they encounter perceived walls of text and they are more likely to stay on page when the text feels “scannable.”
Cleanup awkward formatting. If we encounter formatting that is awkward in some fashion (wrong heading size, unformatted source code, manually simulated headers, etc) we’ll generally recommend cleaning it up and execute that for clients.
Convert bullet lists to numbered lists. Searchers/readers like to feel as though they’re making progress when scanning and reading posts, so when appropriate, changing bullets (unordered lists) to numbers (ordered lists) can improve the scannability.
Convert dense lists to sparse H3s. In the same vein, if you have large lists, either ordered or unordered, that can feel like a wall of text. So if you’re bolding a sentence and then typing 2-3 sentences after that, the way I am in this piece of content, for instance, you should consider changing them to “sparse” subheaders rather than dense lists.
Create bucket brigades. This term has a whole schtick in the SEO copywriting world, but what I’m really getting at here is creating sentences that standalone and draw the eye, often short sentences. In non-editorial refreshes, we do this from existing copy, looking for punchy sentences and isolating them on their own line. This is another device for improving scannability with existing text.
Number H3s in round-up H2s (e.g. "best practices" or "challenges"). When there is some kind of count-noun in a section, and you have subheadings under it corresponding to one of each thing, simply number the subheadings. So each challenge or best practice has a number next to it.
Rev post date. Generally if we’ve made a fairly substantial number of changes, we want to update the published date. Alternatively, you can add text inline talking about when it was last modified.
Update superficial, old dates. If the blog post says something like “These days in 2023,” you want to update that to “in 2025”. I’ll now have to come back and do this every year for this post, at least if I were trying to rank with it.

Graphical

Insert graphic dividers. In service of scannability, a very handy device is a branded page break graphic. If you have a few of those handy and pre-approved, adding them to sections that feel like walls of text can create improved scannability.
Insert pull quotes. Another good option to add more visual interest and bolster scannability is to create pull quotes.

Here is an example of a graphic divider from our website.

Product Marketing

With product marketing interventions, these are generally less about bolstering rank/traffic and more about improving conversion rates through the site and down funnel metrics in general.

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Insert graphical CTA(s). With a graphical call to action (CTA), you create a branded graphic and use it as a link, in the contents of a post, to a page that constitutes a conversion. (Example below).
Insert text CTA(s). A text CTA is simpler – you just ask the reader to do something and supply a link inline in the text. For instance, this is a CTA to visit Hit Subscribe’s home page.

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From the same post on our site, here is a graphical CTA:

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Technical

This type of intervention is “editorial-adjacent.” Some clients are comfortable with this done on auto-pilot, but not with actual editorial changes or additions to the content, since the nuts and bolts of a tutorial don’t typically have a brand component.

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Re-run and update tutorials. If the post is technical in nature, part of the refresh process can include executing the tutorials and updating any text that is out of date.

Editorial

Editorial interventions are the most likely to bottleneck processes and need approvals, though they also tend to be the most significant in terms of generating change graphs.

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Add FAQ to target PAA long-tails. A common technique to add content and widen the keyword basis of the traffic can be to have a “FAQ” section at the end where you supply short answers to specific questions from the people also ask questions in Google (PAA).
Add H2s from ranking competitors. Especially if a post is underperforming for its keyword, one of the most tried and true intervention is to look for subjects ranking articles talk about, but ours does not. Once identified, create content about those topics and add it to the post.
Correct any obvious typos. If the post contains some kind of obvious typo, just fix it while we’re in there.
Modify sections or paragraphs that are outdated or need to be elaborated on. If we identify clearly dated information, we want to get that updated and current.
Remove problematic language. A common example in the tech world is that around 2019 or so, Github updated its terminology to remove the old "master/slave" terminology from its branching, and the community generally came to view this phrasing as in poor taste. So if we see something like that, we flag and change. Some things don’t age well.

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