Rewriting a Page You Wrote Three Years Ago

What actually dates a page

Rarely the writing. Prose ages slowly and most small business pages were never stylish enough to go out of fashion.

What dates is the gap between the page and the business. Services you have dropped. Prices that moved. An area you no longer cover. A person who left. A standard that changed.

None of that is visible when you read the page, because you read it knowing what you meant.

The drift nobody notices

• Services quietly discontinued but still advertised.
• Services added that appear nowhere.
• Prices that have moved since publication.
• The service area, which usually contracts or expands without anybody editing.
• Staff named who have left.
• Claims that are no longer accurate, such as years in business stated as a fixed number.

The last is a small trap. "Over fifteen years of experience" written in 2017 is still saying fifteen in 2020, understating you by three years and quietly signalling that nobody has touched the page.

The audit rather than the rewrite

Most pages do not need rewriting. They need correcting, which is faster and produces most of the benefit.

Read the page with a pen and mark three things: anything factually untrue now, anything missing that you would include if writing today, and anything that describes work you no longer want.

That third category is the one that changes results. A page still promoting the low-margin work you have moved away from keeps producing enquiries for it.

Most pages come out of that with half a dozen small corrections and one structural change.

A worked example

A cleaning company's main services page, written when the business was two people doing domestic work.

Three years later, most revenue came from commercial contracts. The page still opened with houses, listed domestic pricing, and mentioned commercial work in one line near the bottom.

Every enquiry through it was domestic, which they had largely stopped taking.

The rewrite reversed the emphasis rather than changing the tone. Commercial first, with the contract types and what a typical schedule looks like. Domestic kept, honestly, with a note that they took limited residential work.

Enquiries roughly halved and the commercial proportion went from almost none to most of them.

The page had not become wrong. The business had moved and the page had stayed where it was.

The questions that changed

A useful prompt when deciding what to add.

What do customers ask now that they did not ask three years ago. New concerns, new comparisons, new alternatives they are weighing you against.

Those questions are the material for whatever the page is missing, and you already have the answers because you give them on the phone every week.

A page that answers this year's questions reads as current regardless of when it was written.

The counter-case

Where leaving it alone is right.

A page that ranks well and produces enquiries should be edited cautiously. Correct the facts, and think twice before restructuring something that is working.

An evergreen explanation that has not changed because the underlying thing has not changed. How a septic system works did not become different in three years.

And a page nobody visits, which is not worth an hour of rewriting. That one needs a decision about whether to keep it at all.

The instinct that everything needs periodic refreshing is a content-marketing habit rather than a rule, and it produces a lot of churn for its own sake.

Dates on the page

Worth handling deliberately.

A visible publication date on a service page invites the reader to judge currency, and an old date undermines an accurate page.

Service pages generally do not need dates. Articles and news do, because currency is part of what the reader is assessing.

Where a page has a date and you have genuinely updated it, updating the date is honest. Changing the date without changing the content is not, and readers do notice when a page dated last month describes something that ended two years ago.

What to do about the numbers

Specific numbers are the most common thing that quietly expires.

Years in business, team size, jobs completed, prices, response times, the number of towns covered.

Two options. Update them on a schedule, which means remembering. Or phrase them so they do not expire: "since 2005" rather than "fifteen years", "a small team" rather than "four staff".

The second is better for anything you will not reliably maintain, which for most small businesses is everything.

Doing it as a routine

1. List your pages in order of how many people enter through them.
2. Take the top five and read each properly.
3. Mark what is untrue, missing, or unwanted.
4. Correct the facts immediately, which takes minutes.
5. Note anything needing a real rewrite and schedule one page at a time.
6. Diarise the same check annually.

Doing the top five properly beats skimming twenty, because the top five carry most of the traffic and most of the drift matters there.

Merging rather than adding

A pattern worth noticing during the audit.

Sites accumulate pages. Somebody adds one for a new service, then another for a variation, then a third when a campaign needed a landing page. After a few years there are three pages covering nearly the same ground, none of them strong.

Merging them into one good page is usually better than maintaining three thin ones. The combined page has more to say, and there is one thing to keep current rather than three.

The old addresses should redirect to the new one rather than being deleted, so anything linking to them still arrives somewhere sensible.

This is the opposite instinct to the usual advice about publishing more, and for a small site with limited attention it is generally the better trade.

What this is worth

Modest and reliable, which is an unglamorous combination.

Correcting a page will not transform anything. It removes friction, stops attracting the wrong enquiries, and prevents the slow accumulation of small inaccuracies that make a business look unattended.

The businesses that do this once a year have sites that describe them. The ones that do not have sites describing who they were when the site was built, which for a five year old site is a different company.

How to judge whether a page is worth the effort at all is covered in how much text is too much.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.