Five checks worth running before you rewrite a page
A rewrite throws away every signal a page has accumulated and starts the clock again. Sometimes that is exactly right. More often the page was fine and something else was wrong, and the rewrite quietly costs you the rankings you had. These are the checks we run first, in this order.
One: is it losing, or has the market moved?
Compare the page's own trend against the trend for the query. A page that has held its position while the query has shrunk does not need rewriting; it needs a different query. Rewriting it will produce a worse page and the same revenue, which is the most expensive possible outcome.
Two: is it the right page for the query?
Look at what currently ranks. If every result is a comparison and yours is a product page, no amount of rewriting the product page will fix it — the mismatch is structural. This is the single most common reason a well-written page never moves, and it is invisible if you only look at your own site.
It also cuts the other way. Occasionally you find that the results have drifted towards a format you already have elsewhere on the site, and the fix is a redirect rather than a rewrite.
Three: is anything else on the site competing with it?
Two of your own pages targeting one query is a common and self-inflicted wound. The symptom is a page that swaps places with another of your own URLs from week to week and never settles. The fix is consolidation, not rewriting, and consolidation usually raises both.
If you cannot say in one sentence which single query each commercial page is for, you almost certainly have this problem.
Four: can the page be found and read at all?
- Does anything on your own site link to it, other than the sitemap?
- Does it load its main content without waiting for a script?
- Does the version a crawler receives contain the words you think it contains?
- Is it fast on a mid-range phone on a poor connection, not on your desktop?
Any one of these failing makes the quality of the writing irrelevant, and all four are cheaper to fix than a rewrite.
Five: what is it worth if it works?
Estimate the money before you spend the day. Traffic at the position you are aiming for, times your conversion rate on that kind of page, times what a conversion is worth. It is a rough number and it does not need to be better than rough — its job is to sort the list, and it will reorder the list far more than you expect.
The pages people instinctively rewrite first are the ones that annoy them. The pages worth rewriting first are the ones where a small movement crosses a threshold that pays.
What to do about it
- Check the query's own trend before blaming the page.
- Match the page format to what already ranks, or accept that you are fighting the format rather than the competition.
- Consolidate competing pages of your own before rewriting either of them.
- Confirm the page is linked, crawlable, and fast on a phone. Writing cannot fix any of those.
- Put a pound figure against the rewrite before you start, and do the list in that order.