Instead of focusing entirely on creating new content, how about optimally utilizing the pieces that are already published?
Many marketers work with the publish-and-forget model wherein they never visit the old blog posts and take efforts to drive more value from them.
It’s a mistake!!
You’ve been building a solid content asset. A large part of your content marketing strategy should focus on making sure this “asset” brings you higher ROI. Just ask any top digital marketing company Canada and their prioritization of old content.
If you have published too many blog posts, here’s what you should do with them:1. Audit the quality and make improvements
The first step is to audit the quality of your old blog posts and make improvements. See if they map to the highest quality standards.
If you're unsure what to look for, use a tool like Grammarly to check for common errors, typos, and basic issues like readability.
Then, make sure you're hitting all of your required content elements.
For example, are you including an introduction paragraph that explains what the reader can expect from the post? Are you answering the question they came there to find in the first place? Do you have a conclusion that summarizes the key points?
Next, update your images if needed.
You might realize that you need to add more images or update some with better quality photos or additional graphs/charts.
You can also improve the SEO of old blog posts by using this as an opportunity to optimize them for long-tail keywords and search phrases that you didn’t target before.
2. Align them with your existing marketing strategy
Your content marketing strategy has come a long way. It has seen several changes. It looks much different today vs. a year back.
Maybe you even have new content marketing goals now.
So, it’s a good idea to re-visit your old blog posts and ensure they complement your existing/current content marketing strategy and goals. If not, figure out how you can realign the scope of old content to ensure they are relevant to your ongoing campaigns.
3. Refresh it with new information (and purpose)
Refreshing old content is one of the most common (and important) content marketing practices. For example, you can simply refresh your old content by adding a paragraph at the end of each post to help it rank for new keywords or updating key statistics or references in your older posts
Here are some of the most common benefits of refreshing your old content:
It can be a quick win. New blog posts and ebooks can take a lot of time and resources to create. Revitalizing old content is not only much faster, but it's also cheaper because you've already paid for the research, writing, and design.
It can improve traffic and search rankings. Google wants to give searchers the best possible experience, so it ranks pages that are updated more often higher than those that are not. When you update or refresh an old page, you're making it better for users, which makes it better for search engines
It gives you an opportunity to promote your brand again. Most websites publish their new content once or twice a week at the most. Not everyone is online when your content goes live, so republishing older pieces gives you more chances for people to see your brand and engage with your company.
It allows you to re-engage your audience on social media. You can reshare your newly refreshed content on all social platforms with newer context.
Broadly put, here's how to refresh website content:
1. Take inventory of your existing articles and blog posts 2. Identify pages that need to be updated 3. Do some keyword research 4. Update the content! 5. Don't forget about links. Link other blog posts on the site within the repurposed content.4. Consolidate multiple pieces of content
One of the most effective ways to reuse old content is to consolidate multiple pieces of content. Instead of having multiple small pieces of content, combine them together. Google loves long-form comprehensive blogs.
A blog that combines several smaller pieces of content will have more information than a regular blog post. This is often much more useful for readers because they have all the information they need in one spot instead of several different places on your site.
To merge multiple posts, start with the original posts you’d like to merge together. Choose a post that will serve as the host post and then merge other relevant posts into it by using internal links to share additional information.
Also, don’t forget to 301 redirect the URLs for the smaller pieces of content to your new long-form piece. This will help you rank higher in search engines and not lose any traffic from your old pieces of content.
5. Delete them and lose the dead weight
The internet is not a landfill. It's easy to let your old blog posts collect dust in the archives, but that's not doing anyone any good. Some of your old blog posts are just plain bad in quality or don't fulfill any purpose. Deleting them can help you improve the quality of your overall site and reduce your maintenance burden.
It's also important to know that deleted pages can be cached by search engines, and may remain visible for a long time after deletion. That's why you should use redirects to point visitors to the most relevant page on your site, rather than simply deleting the page without replacement.
Now, if you think that deleting your old blog posts will hurt your SEO efforts, think again. It will actually help you. Google's search algorithm favors high-quality content over other factors such as page rank and age of the page. If you have pages on your site that are thin on quality, they may be hurting your SEO efforts and keeping you from ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Final words
Considering how fast audiences continue to change, it is important that you keep the fire burning. By strategically updating old blog posts, not only will you keep your audience engaged, but you can also gain more brand recognition and more conversions.
Keeping old content optimized is an important task, and it allows you to maximize its visibility. However, it's time-consuming and doesn't produce immediate results. Start with making a schedule of all your old content that needs to be optimized. Working on them in batches will help you make the effort less tedious. Again, if you need help, considering connect with experts at a digital marketing company in Kolkata.
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