Since the dawn of the internet age the drive has always been to get more traffic to your site and to your blogs – that goal hasn’t changed with time, but now optimising your existing content is a proven tactic to generate new traffic. Nowadays, part of the digital marketing strategy is to focus on the quality of content instead of focusing on getting bulk content out on to the web.
Should you bother with old content posts? Yes, you can get great leverage from reworking old content to create new traffic – without a doubt. Optimising your old content will do more than drive new traffic it will solidify your brand and improve the way your audience sees what you are offering, giving more value to your reader.
Bin it or keep it?
The first point of call when delving into your old content is deciding on what to keep and what to move to trash. You can begin this process by firstly doing an inventory of your content, so you know exactly what you have. Once you know what content you already have then you can carry out a full assessment so you can make the choice of whether its worth keeping or binning. A tough decision indeed.
A few points to keep in mind when doing a content inventory and carrying out an assessment are as follows:
- Co-ordinating metadata of your content will help you in the assessment phase.
- Decide whether your content is beneficial for your readers and if it’s entertaining and informative.
- Is the old content in line with your current branding and style. Keeping a consistent brand is key to digital marketing.
- Is the quality of your old content high? If there are tons of grammatical errors, or content doesn’t really make good sense, then there’s no point in keeping it.
- Does this content benefit you? As much as it’s important to keep your readers top of mind with your content, you should also consider whether your old content is still beneficial to you and your brand.
- With online trends constantly changing being relevant with your content is a key point in digital marketing. Decide whether your old content is still relevant.
Benefits of reusing old content
Once you have completed an inventory and an assessment of your old content you can now move on to the reviving and revamping stage. This is exciting as you will no doubt be more SEO savvy, and this is a great opportunity to improve your search engine optimisation.
Keeping the golden rule that content is king top of mind, there are many benefits of optimising your old content to generate new traffic, below are a few:
- The Freshness Factor – Google’s Freshness Factor is a part of their overall search engine algorithm, which is often overlooked. This clever bot prevents old, high ranking pages from continually appearing at the top of the results page. Freshen up your old content and your good to go to get not only new traffic but increased ranking with Google.
- More and new traffic – Back in the day, SEO tactics was more than likely nothing more than a new fad or trend to you, but SEO is here to stay. Therefore, constantly improving the SEO in your old content can generate more and new traffic.
- Rankings boost – If you’ve updated your posts and included effective SEO strategies your overall ranking will improve with the search engines.
- Staying current – Updating your old content not only gives you a second chance to score new traffic but it shows your readers that you want to keep on improving and updating your content. Be careful not to make only a small update on your content, the point is to refresh and revamp your old content.
The importance of the follow up
So, you’ve spent many hours updating, reviving and revamping your old content, what’s next? To get the most value out of optimising your old content, it’s important to monitor and keep tabs on the responses your updates are getting. It’s also important to practice patience when monitoring the success of your old content updates as search engines, even Google, can take a few months to update its rankings.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.