Content Rewriting and Page ranking

[Spartan22]

Lets say that  a prior writer did a horrible job with more then a few pages on your site and you wanted to rewrite the content for each landing page. A few of these landing pages are actually ranking pretty decently would it be ok to rewrite them as long as you kept the keywords and the density some what equal?

[EGOL]

Make big improvements to a few unimportant pages.  See what happens.   I think that this is relatively safe.

[Spartan22]

The pages in question are between 500-800 words long with a keyword density of 1-3% in variations. I am nervous about losing ranking on 1 in particular but it def needs an over haul.

[EGOL]

I frequently rewrite short pages that were published many years ago with totally new, substantive content, with more and better images.  They usuelly move up the SERPs within a few weeks.

[Christy-Correll]

Ryan's advice is solid. I'd also keep a close eye on the page level metrics for these landing pages. If the copy is horrible, I'm guessing that most of your KPIs aren't great either. (My point being that high keyword traffics are great when they bring in qualified traffic that leads to conversions, but are no good to you if the traffic doesn't convert.) Best of luck!

Christy

[RyanPurkey]

This would make a great split test from a UX perspective but also be a good way to slowly introduce the new content.

Just from search, If the page changes dramatically it might bounce out of the rankings briefly, but if the content topic and contextual relevance is mostly the same it should reappear.  You could try introducing parts or all of the new content as an update to the top fold of the page as well, monitor rankings, then remove the parts you don't like.  Several ways to test it out... cheers!