When it comes to making the most of a content strategy, thinking that producing brand new content is the only way to get traction in Google’s search results is a common trap. While getting into a regular routine of creating informative, engaging content is a good way to help build your brand and credibility, it’s also important to look back at what’s performed well with your older content to see what can be combined and condensed.

The reality is, Google now wants high-quality, useful content and keeping additional pages on your website with content that doesn’t truly speak to those guidelines is more likely to hurt your SEO in the long run. Consider any pages that were added initially for indexing but don’t truly have a lot of meaningful information to provide consumers – chances are people aren’t spending much time on those pages and they can probably be combined on a new page to add more value and boost your SEO.

Once you start thinking about optimizing old webpages, you can move on to other forms of content you’ve created in the past, too. Let’s look at some key tricks to repurpose old content that will help you boost your credibility and overall SEO this year:

Repurpose Old Content with These Tips

  1. Audit ALL Content

Start by making a list of all the blog articles, whitepapers, guides, etc. that have done well on your site. You can use Google Analytics to run a full report and see which pages have received good conversion rates, the most leads, long view times and more.

Divide this content into what’s helped you gain traction, what isn’t really doing much for your site, and what could potentially even hurt your site. Eliminate anything that isn’t getting noticed and focus on what’s getting the highest traffic – then consider how you can expand on it even further.

  1. Consolidate content

Based on the content that hasn’t performed well, consider what information can be combined with similar topics and use that to create pages or update content to make it even stronger and more engaging. You can also redirect old pages to ones that are more relevant on your website.

  1. Optimize internal links

There’s a lot to be said for internal links, especially ones that link directly from your homepage where Google and other website crawlers start their assessment of your website. The right internal links will help Google sort out the relevance and value of your pages, which has an added effect on your overall SEO. It may not seem like much, but this is an important step that can often be overlooked.

  1. Expand keywords

Google is no longer interested in simple high performing keywords; now, keywords that are longer and more related to search terms users are looking for are ones you should be targeting and including in your website copy and content.

You can even expand this to add a FAQ section of your website or as a small addition to your blog posts, by including these keywords as part of common questions that consumers are looking for answers to.

  1. Reinvent your content

As mentioned in the first point, make a list of content that has done well so far and find ways to tweak or update it. This can be as simple as taking beautiful high-quality photos in your blogs or elsewhere on your website and sharing them on your Instagram channel with sporadic links back to that specific article page. You can take articles and transform them into longer guides that can then be shared through newsletters or on social.

If you have a YouTube channel, consider adding any past webinars or how-to videos that can be linked back to your site. Have a topic you’re particularly passionate about that you want to expand on beyond video? Transform it into a podcast! Podcasts are becoming more popular and are easy to set up (hint: ask us about our podcast services!).

Limited on time and resources but want to build and execute a content strategy? We’d be happy to help! Contact us for more information.

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