How to Use FreshRank to Turn Dying Posts Into Traffic Winners

Your old blog posts are just sitting there, collecting dust and losing rankings. 🤷‍♂️ Google’s already moved on to newer, fresher content, and your competitors are outranking you. We kind of know this story firsthand because this did happen to us in the past.

Here’s what most people don’t know: updating existing content crushes writing new posts from scratch. It’s faster, it ranks quicker, and Google actually rewards it. But doing it manually? That’s hours of checking facts, analyzing SEO, reviewing Search Console data, and rewriting paragraphs.

That’s why we built FreshRank to help you make all that much more efficient. FreshRank analyzes your content 🔍, pulls real traffic data from Google Search Console 📊, fact-checks your claims ✔️, finds SEO opportunities 🚀, and finally even rewrites it using AI ✍️.

This guide explains exactly how to use it.

What FreshRank does

FreshRank has three main groups of features:

• It connects with Google Search Console to fetch your website’s actual data, and then points out which of your posts need the most attention right now – based on traffic trends, rankings, etc.
• It analyzes your content with the help of the all-knowing-computer-god AI and gives you concrete, actionable suggestions on how to improve that content – it points to exact parts of your post, phrasings, data, and facts.
• It’s then capable of writing an updated draft for you, based on all those previous suggestions plus your own presets.

It’s basically your all-in-one content updates team.

This is just a bird’s-eye view of what FreshRank is, so now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty and show you how to use this plugin to reach its full potential:

How to use FreshRank

This is basic, so let’s not spend too much time here. FreshRank is a classic WordPress plugin. To install it, just grab the .zip archive from here and upload the plugin to your site through the WordPress dashboard → Plugins → Add Plugin → Upload Plugin:

Then, activate it when the upload completes.

With that done, you’ll see a new section in your sidebar – “FreshRank AI”; go straight to the settings panel:

You’ll need to set up a couple of things there:

First, on the Google Search Console tab (image above), add your “OAuth Client ID” and “OAuth Client Secret” to connect with GSC. You can get both directly from Google Cloud. It’s where you can manage all your API access to Google’s services.

Note: You can use FreshRank without GSC, but you won’t get any prioritization features (data on which articles to update first). Just do it. It’s free.

If all went well, you should see a success message in the panel.

While you’re here, also make sure to tick the box up top where it says “Enable GSC-based article prioritization.”

At this stage, FreshRank is getting all your traffic data from GSC and will start analyzing your site for content that should be updated first.

Next, enter your OpenAI API keys.

You can do that in the next tab:

You can get your API key over at platform.openai.com.

This is also a good moment to pick the AI models that are going to do all the work. FreshRank gives you a handful of choices – it supports all the most recent models – and lets you switch between them. If you’re not quite sure what to pick here, just stick with the pre-selected ones. FreshRank always comes with a good preset. 👍

Pro move: I actually encourage you to test multiple models to see which ones you like best and which do the best work for your site/content/niche.

Analyze content with FreshRank

Now that the setup is complete, we can begin content analysis.

To get the fun started, go to the main FreshRank panel in your WordPress dashboard:

You’ll see a list of all your published articles, along with options to analyze the entire list or select individual articles for analysis.

If you have GSC integrated, you’ll also see an additional option to prioritize them based on GSC data.

The best way to begin is to first sort the articles by priority and then analyze them from top to bottom.

This is what the list looks like for me when I do that:

If you click on the priority score of any post, you’ll see why FreshRank thinks it needs an update. For example:

As you can see, this post received perfect score on the priority scale (which isn’t actually good, but I digress).

Similarly, FreshRank will prioritize all your other content and then display the list in order. Cool, right?

If you haven’t analyzed your content yet, you can do so by clicking the Analyze Current Page button at the top or any of the individual Analyze buttons next to each article.

Once the analysis is complete, you can click on the analysis score to see FreshRank’s assessment of an article’s quality.

As you can see, FreshRank is thorough and provides a lot of insight. Moreover, it also searches the web to get the freshest data on whatever topic the article covers.

If you prefer to improve your content manually, this is perfect moment to take all the tips and start implementing them yourself.

But there’s more in store:

Rewrite content with FreshRank

FreshRank not only tells you what to change but also does the work for you. Next to every analyzed article, you will find a button to create an updated draft:

But before you click it, let’s step back and adjust some of the finer settings so you can control which issues FreshRank focuses on most.

Let’s go back to FreshRank settings:

You can adjust any of these boxes to pick which issues are going to be fixed in the rewrite stage.

You can go as wide or as narrow as you wish. A good starting point to get the hang of things is to select the “red” categories first, meaning factual updates and high-severity issues.

With that done, you can go back to the main FreshRank dashboard and get some new drafts created!

Keep in mind that generating a draft will take a minute or two. FreshRank sends all the data, along with custom prompts, insights and guidelines, to OpenAI and then waits to get the draft back.

When done, you’ll see the post info updated in the FreshRank dashboard:

Click on View Draft Details to see a summary of what FreshRank did and all the issues addressed:

Here, you can also view changes, preview the new draft, or edit it to make additional changes by hand.

I like this “view changes” option in particular because it takes you to the revisions interface in WordPress and points out every little change one by one:

Once you’ve verified the changes and made sure that all is right, you can approve the draft and have it rolled out in place of the current version of your post:

Last but not least:

Track your progress over time

FreshRank also comes with its own performance tracking module. You can find it in FreshRank AI → Analytics.

“Do I even need this if I already have Google Analytics on my site?”

Yes, you do! FreshRank looks at your statistics in a totally different way. First, it focuses on your potential gains vs updates that can be made to your content. In other words, it translates all those raw traffic numbers into data that tells you exactly what you can gain by working on a specific article.

It also tracks the progress you’ve made over time since updating a given article.

This is a goldmine of information. You’ll probably spend a while browsing through all this data and discovering new posts to work on.

Your move!

This is how to use FreshRank to make your content better – for both readers and Google.

As you’ve seen, it’s mostly a push-button kind of interface where you just pick what you want FreshRank to do, and then you don’t have to worry about how it does it.

Here’s the complete FreshRank workflow at a bird’s-eye view. Just six steps to better content:

👉 Get your copy of FreshRank here
👉 Try the free version
👉 Use the analysis feature without installing a plugin on freshrank.ai

Let me know if you have any questions about the plugin or how to use it.

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