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Why You Should Enhance and Repurpose Your Old Content

Creating and publishing seo content is a great way to build an SEO presence for your brand. But it isn’t the only way to improve your seo rankings.
In truth, focusing on only crafting new content these days simply isn't enough.

With fierce competition, strict Google guidelines, and a wave of new trends, it's extremely easy for your content to get lost in the online sea we call the internet. Meaning that your brand needs to go the extra mile and ensure that it's being seen, heard, and remembered.

Naturally, this is easier said than done - but it's not impossible. Want to know you can accomplish this?
By consistently recycling your evergreen content!

So, besides crafting killer new content regularly, you should also be repurposing and enhancing successful older, evergreen content.

Just think about it, your potential customers don’t all spend their time on the same platforms and channels, nor do they all process content in the same way. Therefore, repurposing your content can help generate new clicks and leads, boost your marketing strategy, and improve your authority.

Stick around as we're about to break down why you must be repurposing your content in this technological age.

What Are the Benefits of Repurposing and Improving Older Content?

Reach a new audience.

Reach new audience

While your target audience may have a common pain point that they’re seeking to solve, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will all resonate with your content in the same way. After all, some people are more visual, whereas others may prefer textual content. 

Therefore, reformatting your content into different forms, such as infographics, podcasts, eBooks, and so on, enables you to garner awareness for your brand on multiple platforms, appeal to more audiences, extend your reach, and in turn, generate more traffic and leads. 

Make the most out of your efforts.

Creating winning content takes time and effort. So, if you already have a successful and relevant, older piece of content, rather than letting it collect dust in your archives, why not use it as another way to reinforce your brand’s message and drive ROI? 

Remember, when it comes to SEO, the quality and quantity of your content are the number one priority. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you must create new content from scratch to drive results - especially if you have older, highly relevant content that contains backlinks. Repurposing content such as this will give you a head start over newer competitor pages with no backlinks. 

Get an SEO Boost 

Do you know how long the shelf life of your content is? While we can’t give you a specific number, know that things in the SEO world change fast. 

So, work on repurposing your content for SEO! 

Not only does this improve your E-A-T, as it’ll help you become an expert on the topic, but it also provides you with another opportunity to target the right keywords, gain backlinks, and even rank higher on Google.  

Further, your older pages have (most likely) already been indexed by Google. Meaning you won’t need to worry about having your new content indexed and wasting your crawl budget.

Note: when refreshing your content, you must do so in a way that doesn’t risk duplicate content penalties and content fatigue - as you’ll be doing more harm than good. With that in mind, here's what you should avoid.

  • Duplicate content: don’t republish the same piece of content on your website. Google defines duplicate content as: “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar.” 
  • Don’t ignore any feedback received on the old content. Instead, use it as constructive criticism to improve the content and demonstrate that you listen to your audience. 

In other words, make sure your content is unique. If you’re unsure if you’re duplicating content or not, check out plagiarism tools like Copyscape or even Google a snippet of your text. 

What Content Should You Repurpose? 

What content to repurpose?

So, now that we understand the benefits of repurposed content, how do you decide what content needs to be enhanced and repurposed?

Step 1: Audit Your Content

Content falls into three main categories:

  • Content that helps you
  • Content that harms you
  • Content that does nothing for you

Take the time to organize your content into the relevant categories. To help you in this process, turn to crawlers such as Screamingfrom, oncrawl, Sitebulb, or any other crawler that works best for you. 

Step 2: Evaluate the Quality of Your Content

Google says: you are what you E-A-T, and therefore, defines quality content as content that builds Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, which means your content must be:

  • Useful and informative
  • Extremely valuable and high-quality
  • Engaging
  • Credible

And that’s not all! Following the basic principles listed in Google’s webmaster quality guidelines is just as important.

Step 3: Determine what to do with your existing content.

Use Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions about whether you should improve or repurpose your content. Take a look at metrics such as traffic, engagement, social shares, ranking, if it generates high-quality links and conversions, and so on. 

For example, if your content gets consistent traffic, has earned some valuable shares but has below-average engagement, it may need an update or refresh. Whereas if an article receives little to no traffic, it may need a complete rewrite. 

Dig into your Google Analytics to understand which of your posts did well over the years and why. Take it one step further by using Google Search Console to help you understand the search terms people are using to find your blogs. Use this information to help you create your repurposing strategy. 

Focus on the metrics that matter the most to your company to decide the fate of your content. And most importantly, only repurpose evergreen content, that is, content that continues to be valuable and relevant to your audience over the years. 

Great Ways to Repurpose Content

Great ways to repurpose and enhance content

Once you have found an interesting, evergreen piece of content that you’d like to repurpose, it’s time to prepare it for its new layout. Here are a few new formats for you to try out: 

  1. Webinars/Podcasts → Videos. So, you hosted a kickass webinar, but not everyone could make it? Don’t let all your information go to waste by turning it into video content. Not only will your content be available to newer audiences -especially on social media-, but also, you may be able to drive new visitors to your site. And vice versa, if you have an informative video that could be turned into a webinar or podcast, do it!
  2. Blog posts → Guides/Webinars/Podcasts/Newsletters. Don’t let your older blog posts become lost and forgotten. See if you can group similar posts to create an “ultimate guide,” webinar, or even podcast. Make sure you edit the tone of voice of your blog post to suit the medium you choose.
  3. Internal data → Case studies/eBook. Sharing data and success stories are always the way to go. Shine a light on your success by turning any exciting data you have into case studies.
  4. Case studies → Infographics. Do you have image-heavy case studies with many graphs and charts? Repurpose them into infographics. Infographics are digestable, easy, gripping, shareable, and a form of visual marketing that can boost your brand awareness rapidly. What's not to love? 
  5. Quora Q&A → Blog posts. Quora is an excellent source of inspiration. You can turn popular questions, and turn them into blog posts that provide audiences with in-depth answers and insights. Once written, don’t forget to link to your blog post in the original Quora question. This way, you can direct the audiences that are searching for answers directly to your site.

As you can see, there are endless repurposing possibilities for your content. Just keep in mind, no matter the new format you choose, don't let a lack of authenticity kill your marketing efforts! Remaining authentic in all that you do is crucial to further your E-A-T efforts.

Want to learn more about boosting the value of your efforts and, in turn, rankings?

Reach out to us today to learn more about enhancing your content, creating new content, improving your rankings, or anything else in digital marketing! Our experts are eager to help you smash your goals and reach the top.