SEO

Plan a content refresh calendar for aging posts

A prompt that triages a list of old posts by decay pattern and traffic value to build a realistic refresh schedule instead of refreshing everything on a fixed cadence.

Works with Claude / GPT980 uses 4.3

The prompt

seo-content-refresh-calendar
[yourdomain.com] has 220 blog posts published more than 18 months ago. Traffic to the
site overall is flat, but a spot check shows some of these old posts have quietly
lost half their traffic over the last year while others are still performing fine.
The team can realistically refresh about 8 posts per month.

POST LIST WITH LAST-12-MONTHS TRAFFIC TREND (paste export: URL, publish date, current
traffic, traffic 12 months ago): [paste here]
TEAM CAPACITY: [8 refreshes per month]
BUSINESS PRIORITY PAGES (if any deserve priority regardless of traffic): [list here,
or say "none"]

Build the calendar like someone who has to justify this plan to a manager who wants a
traffic number, not a checklist:
1. Segment the 220 posts into decline patterns: steep sustained drop (likely a real
   content or competitive problem), slow gradual decline (likely normal aging, lower
   urgency), and stable or growing (exclude from refresh entirely, refreshing a page
   that's working risks breaking what's working).
2. Within the steep-decline group, prioritize by traffic value (traffic lost x
   estimated conversion value) rather than by how old the post is, since a 3-year-old
   post that lost 50 visits/month matters less than a 1-year-old post that lost 500.
3. For the first 8 posts (month 1), state specifically what kind of refresh each
   needs: factual update (prices, screenshots, year in title), competitive gap fill
   (competitors added sections this lacks), or full rewrite (original was thin to
   begin with), since "refresh" isn't one action and effort estimates differ a lot
   between them.
4. Build a 6-month calendar assuming 8/month, sequencing the highest-value
   steep-decline posts first, and note where a business-priority page should jump the
   queue even if its traffic trend doesn't justify it on its own.
5. Flag any posts where the real cause of decline looks like it's a SERP feature (a
   featured snippet or AI overview now answers the query directly) rather than an
   outrankable competitor, since refreshing content won't fix that and the calendar
   slot would be better spent elsewhere.

Refreshing on a fixed schedule (oldest first, or everything once a year) wastes effort on pages that were never going to move and starves the ones actually bleeding traffic. This prompt sorts by decline pattern and traffic value first, so the 8 slots each month go where they’ll show up in a traffic report.