Hey folks,
Elliot here.
Today I want to talk about the biggest growth opportunities in content marketing…and why they’re probably sitting forgotten in your CMS.
Too many brands focus on constantly creating new and exciting content, but don’t spend enough time going back and improving those older pieces you’ve already paid for. In my experience, this can sometimes have far better ROI than creating new content.
This is what happened with our client WorldFirst. Before we started creating new content, we prioritized optimizing existing content and increased conversions from those blogs by 234% (more details later).
But how do you actually keep on top of updating older content, without creating a huge amount of manual work for your team?
That’s where AI workflows come in. They can help you identify what needs updating, work out what’s changed, and automate much of the tedious work involved in refreshing it.
In this week’s newsletter, I’ll show you why improving old content can be one of the highest-leverage places to put your content budget, and how AI is making it so much easier to tackle aging content without the resource-drain of doing it manually.
Why should you even care about old content?
Firstly, why should you even care about old content? Is there a downside of leaving old content live? Does anyone even read it?
The answer is…sometimes.
Old pages can still rank in Google for keywords you’re not aware of or be pulled into AI answers months or years after you’ve forgotten about them.
If a prospect reads this content, and it’s sloppy and full of out of date information, they’ll lose trust in your brand. If you can’t put out correct and relevant content, how will you treat them as a customer?
It’s a bit like the broken windows theory: the idea that small, visible signs of neglect can make a place feel uncared for. One broken window might not seem like a big deal, but if nobody fixes it, it sends a signal that nobody is really paying attention. Old content can work the same way. One neglected page might seem harmless, but if your marketing feels outdated or poorly maintained, prospects may start wondering what else is.
Plus, some of those old pages may be much closer to driving revenue than you realize. A blog sitting at position 9 could be one small refresh away from the top three. A page already getting qualified traffic might just need better product positioning or a stronger CTA to start converting.
Of course, not every old article is worth refreshing. I’d recommend looking for these high opportunity signals (you can do it manually, or use an AI workflow like the one we talk about further down this email):
How 36 refreshed articles drove 234% more conversions
Does optimizing older articles really lead to an increase in conversions, and is it something you can measure and present to leadership to justify an investment in content?
Absolutely, and here’s a real example.
We worked with WorldFirst, a cross-border payments provider with a huge content library. Before writing anything new, we decided to first optimize 36 of their existing articles across 3 regions, with a goal of improving rankings and increasing conversions.
Here’s what we saw:
- Conversions from those articles went from 32 to 107: that’s a 234% increase
- 12 articles that had never converted before started converting for the first time
- LLM visibility for key buying prompts went from 27% to 53.4%
Their article is a good example: How to Source Wholesale Using 1688.com Outside China | WorldFirst UK.
The original version of this blog gave a solid overview of 1688 (a Chinese platform for sourcing products), but it was missing a crucial section on why the reader ought to use WorldFirst. This is a fairly simple addition that can yield huge gains. This blog alone grew from 2 conversions to 25.
Wondering how you can improve existing content to increase conversions? Learn more here: What Good BOFU Content Looks Like (And Tips on Creating it)
How to use AI workflows to make updating old content easy
Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you why you ought to update some of your older content. Now it’s time to talk about ‘how’ you can do it without taking up hours and hours of your team's time having to:
- Identify articles that have dropped in rankings or are performing poorly
- Make a decision on whether they’re worth updating
- Diagnose why they’re not performing and what needs to change
- Make the changes in the text
- Update the CMS
None of that is particularly difficult. It’s just extremely time consuming and tedious, especially when there’s a long list of content to update.
This is where AI workflows can make a huge difference. Instead of asking someone to manually find, diagnose and update every page, you can automate much of the process and keep humans focused on the decisions that actually need their expertise and judgement.
This exact use case is something we’ve started offering at Mint Studios. We use AirOps, although Claude Skills or n8n can work too. Set up properly, it can:
- Automatically flag articles that have lost rankings or AI citations and suggest what to fix
- Rewrite them using your existing brand voice and product messaging
- Find outdated links or references and research replacements
- Preserve formatting and images
- Send the draft to Slack for review, then push it to your CMS
This means the content person can focus on the content: checking the output reads well, tweaking it if necessary and then signing it off.
This is just one use case. You can also use AirOps for much simpler jobs, like finding every page that still uses outdated branding after a positioning change and updating it in one go. It’s an easy job, but doing it manually across a large content library is mind numbing and could easily take a day or more to edit.
For our own website, we found that using this AI-powered content refresh workflow to identify and update underperforming articles has helped us go from roughly 1 optimized article a month to 6, saving around 10 hours a month, and increasing LLM visibility by 33% across the refreshed content.
To see how it works, watch Araminta walk through the workflow here:
Get the most out of the content investment you’ve already made
I see content as an investment, and to squeeze the most value you can out of it, you need to maintain it. It doesn’t make sense to constantly invest in new content when you have gold sitting in your library.
AI has made that maintenance so much easier. You can now spot underperforming pages, update outdated information, refresh positioning and republish content without asking your team to spend their week trawling through the CMS.
We’re constantly experimenting and testing new AI workflows to get more from your content and turn it into a pipeline. Keep an eye on your inbox, and follow us on YouTube to see what we’re learning as we go!
Mint Studios Recommended Reads
- Case Study: How We Helped WorldFirst Reach 50+ Conversions per Month with Content: The full story of how we grew conversions from existing content by 234%, ranked in the top 3 for 70% of targeted buying keywords, and nearly doubled LLM visibility from 27% to 53.4%
- Content Debt: A $4.63 Trillion Business Liability: An interesting report by Storyblok/FT Longitude on the hidden cost of outdated, duplicated and poorly maintained content
- Semrush: When to Update Blog Content & Why You Should: Ironically an older blog, but still useful (especially if you use Semrush). A practical guide to spotting which pages are worth refreshing, consolidating or deleting, and when an update is likely to improve performance.
Thanks for reading,
Elliot & the Mint team 🎉
We help financial services and fintech companies turn content into measurable pipeline. Learn more about what we do.
