When developing a digital marketing strategy for your business, you should never underestimate the power of high-quality blog content.
From driving website traffic to building brand equity, content can significantly influence the perceptions and behaviours of both your existing and prospective customers.
While blogs can support your SEO performance and provide your brand with material to share on social media, it can be challenging to find the time to put together relevant content that will be valuable to your audience.
Thankfully, one of the perks of content creation is that you don’t have to consistently reinvent the wheel.
By working smarter, rather than harder, you can leverage blogs that have been successful in the past and repurpose them to generate results in the present.
Why Reuse Old Blog Content?
At first thought, it may not seem like a worthwhile exercise to reuse blogs that you have distributed in the past, but there is much to be gained from digging into your archives and dusting off old gems.
No matter whether it was originally published two, three or even several years ago, your old content can be freshened up to generate further results for your business and deliver even more value to your audience.
Reach New Audiences
Your target market may be defined by certain demographics, interests and behaviours, but the people who met this criteria a couple of years ago have likely been joined by a new pool of individuals or potentially replaced all together.
With the development of new products and services, brand shifts and business growth, you may also be looking to reach audiences that you weren’t tapping into a few years back.
By repurposing your old content, you have the opportunity to provide new members of your audience with the latest information on topics that have proven to be of interest in the past.
Better Your SEO
Generally speaking, blog content is likely to generate short term results that will taper off over time as newer and more relevant content becomes available.
As Google is interested in providing users with the most up to date content, your blogs could start to slip further down in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as time goes by.
When you refresh and update your content, however, you are essentially giving your blog a kickstart to enable it to once again build keyword relevancy and drive qualified traffic.
Save Time
If you have to write a blog from scratch, you’ll need to gather information, conduct research and brainstorm ideas… and that’s before you even start to put any words down on paper.
For those who are time poor, old blog content can provide a goldmine of information that can significantly reduce the hours required to complete the writing process.
As much of the groundwork has already been done for you, it’s simply a matter of adding a fresh perspective or breathing new life into old information.
Expand on Ideas
While you could update existing content to improve relevancy, you could also take a deeper dive into the subtopics raised throughout the blog.
With this approach, a single blog could enable you to branch out and produce two or three new pieces of content that provide more information on topics and themes that have previously resonated with your audience.
How to Repurpose Your Blog Content?
When deciding which blog topics should live to see another day, it’s important to first take a look at your Google Analytics account to identify content that has performed well in the past.
What you’re looking for is a high volume of traffic, strong click through rates to other internal pages and associated goal completions.
While users may not have converted on your actual blog page, your tracking data should reveal whether various form submissions throughout your site can be attributed back to your blog content.
Other insights that may suggest a blog is worthy of being repurposed include above average page view times and low bounce rates. You could also use heat mapping tools to see how users have interacted and engaged with past blogs to inform how you freshen up your content.
Google Trends could also be a source of inspiration to see if there are any parallels between current hot topics and your past blog content that may be worth exploring.
Once you’ve selected the most suitable content to repurpose, you should aim to –
- Maintain the general content structure.
- Preserve relevant paragraphs and maintain existing wording.
- Remove outdated information.
- Elaborate on new ideas.
- Include new imagery and videos if appropriate.
- Add additional internal links.
You’ll also want to change the publishing date to present day, while keeping the same blog title and URL structure and making a note at the start of the post that the content has been recently updated.
To give your updated content a stronger SEO focus, you can also optimise headers, metadata and keyword density as needed.
Need Some Help?
At Distl, our digital marketing specialists can assist you with creating strategic blog content that’s designed to generate results for your business.
From improving SEO performance to encouraging social media engagement, we can work with you to optimise your content in line with your unique business objectives.
If you need guidance and suggestions on how to take advantage of your existing blog content.
