Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
When organic growth stalls, creating new content is one of the ways to get things back on track. A new blog post, a new landing page, a new service page- but is it always the answer? A new page is not always the best way to improve SEO. Before you create another piece of content, look at existing content to see if it can be improved
Why not just publish more content?
A new page starts from zero. It has no links, no history, and no proof it deserves to rank. It also has to be crawled, indexed and understood, and then it competes with established pages that have years of authority behind them.
New content also runs the risk of hurting existing content; if it overlaps with something you’ve already published, it can compete with your own pages for the same queries, also known as keyword cannibalisation, leaving you worse off than before.
Where the faster wins usually are
Pages already on the edge of page one If a page ranks in positions 8 to 20, Google already understands the page and the topic. Sharpening the title, expanding thin sections, and adding internal links can move it far faster than a new page could.
Internal linking. Many sites have strong pages that barely pass authority to the pages that need it. Adding relevant internal links from high-traffic pages to important commercial ones is low effort and often overlooked.
Indexing and technical health. If valuable pages aren’t being indexed because the crawl budget is being wasted, more content only makes the problem worse.
When to create new content
Optimising existing pages isn’t always the answer. A new page makes sense when there’s a clear search intent that your site doesn’t address or maybe you’re launching a new service or location that fills a gap in the market.
What this means for your business
Good SEO isn’t about producing the most pages. It’s about getting the most from the ones you have, then adding new content where it fills a real gap. If your brand is constantly creating new pages you may be losing focus on your existing content.
