If you’ve spent any time working on an SEO campaign, the chances are that you have a lot of quality content on your website, whether that be blog posts, tutorials, or landing pages.
But for whatever reason, that content may not be performing at its best, or have even passed its sell-by date as new techniques and trends have formed.
Rather than deleting your old content, however, you could consider adding a new sheen to well-worn material to increase conversions and improve your search engine optimisation.
Below, we’ve rounded up some top tips for repurposing your old content for a new audience.
Analyse your current portfolio of content and decide what needs to be revised, expanded, and republished.
Make sure that every change you make to your content is meaningful and adds real value, rather than simply “tarting” up old posts with new graphics and designs.
Google is known to love refreshed content, so find posts that have performed well in the past and expand upon them with further insights and findings to bring it back to the top spot.
If you are a market leader in Scottish whisky, for example, updating a blog post offering a full history of the drink with videos, images, and user-generated content will help you to rank higher on Google.
It’s all about breathing new life into an otherwise stale post that no longer drives traffic.
Have blog posts that still drive traffic to your website every month, but haven’t been updated for years?
Though popular now, you shouldn’t rest on your laurels, especially if your content is out of date, or a competitor has just published an all-bells, all-whistles piece that blows yours out of the water with infographics, videos, and case studies to back up their points.
Use Google Analytics to find posts that drive consistent traffic and review their current state – some evergreen posts may never need to be updated, but others will need bringing into the 2020s.
Replace outdated statistics with the latest 2019 findings, and ensure that you’re linking to the products and services that you’re pushing today – not ones from five years ago.
Don’t change things for the sake of it.
If you’re ranking at number one for a quality blog post and it doesn’t need to be updated or expanded upon, then adding more content could have the reverse effect.
The “skyscraper technique” encourages bloggers to create content that is so in-depth it has to rank high, but that could actually push visitors to bounce.
If they’re overwhelmed with how much they’d have to read to find the information they were looking for, they’ll go back to the search results and look for an easier explanation.
What’s more, you should be very careful about changing URLs, especially if you’ve scored a lot of backlinks for that particular post.
Doing so could see your blog plummet from Google overnight, so instead, think about revising the title (keeping the keyword phrase intact).
For updated posts, consider changing the publication date and time, but add a disclaimer to state that you’ve updated an older piece with fresh information, statistics, and case studies.
Adapting content into new formats is the simplest and most effective way to improve and repurpose old material and increase conversions.
The best part? It doesn’t cost you a penny.
One blog post, for example, could be chopped down into multiple graphics and tidbits for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and used as a script for a new YouTube video.
Remember, by 2022, videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic, 15 times higher than in 2017, so it pays to convert some of your blog posts into videos.
If you’re a fan of long-form content, you could even chop blog posts down into smaller, bitesize articles for your knowledge base and app.
A blog post such as ‘The Ultimate Guide to Looking After a Dog’, for example, could be turned into twenty shorter articles such as ‘How to Groom a Puppy’ and ‘The Best Organic Puppy Food’ – great ways to rank for more relevant keywords.
Focus on similar subjects in your blog posts?
Consider gathering together some of your most popular pieces and putting them into an eBook with some images, graphics and an index page.
You can offer this as a free resource to anyone who signs up to your mailing list and send out regular promotions to those subscribers to promote your products and services.
Alternatively, if the demand is there, you could revise some of your blog posts and sell your eBook on Amazon, introducing a new revenue stream for your business based on content.
There you have it – just some of the ways you can repurpose old blog posts and content to improve conversions and SEO.
Be sure to reach out to the Dundee search engine optimisation specialists here at Zudu if you’re looking to increase your ranks on Google.
