Improving your SEO Strategy by making old news, new news again
Near enough every website you will visit, will host a blogs section. This content, whether inadvertently selling a product or service, highlighting a recent news story, or providing educational information for website visitors, will have at one point been at the top of the blogs page – and most likely, promoted and delivered to target audiences across the organisation’s various marketing channels, including its social media and email marketing platforms, through to its paid for channels such as web advertisements and search engine marketing.
However, once that blog post is superseded by other blog posts, it will slip down the page listing, and soon enough become old news. Businesses often will have spent valuable resource in creating this engaging original content, so it seems a shame to let this content go to waste – for many reasons. Firstly you are missing out on an obvious and quite straight-forward SEO opportunity, and secondly, significant return on investment.
Repurposing blog content can have many benefits, such as:
- Improving you site’s click-through rate
- Greater accuracy of content (& removal of broken links)
- Improving your search engine ranking by adding new resource and content to your site
- Implementing and improving your keywords to improve your SEO efforts
- Providing you with fresh and engaging content, which can be used to promote key messages and services through other promotional content channels.
Below are some helpful tips on how you can improve and refresh your blog posts to help boost your SEO efforts:
Tip 1. Identify your best performing blogs
Identify which posts are the top performers by using free tools such as Google Analytics, which are great for comparing metrics such as traffic numbers, inbound links, social shares and keywords. Once you know your top performers, you can start to repurpose.
Tip 2. Make more of your keywords
Insert keywords into the existing blog content that you are trying to rank better for in the search rankings. Keyword and SEO tools, such as Google Search Console and SEMRush can help you to identify the best keyword ranking opportunities. Ahrefs is one such keyword tool that enables users to determine how a keyword ranks by copying and pasting the URL of the blog post into the platform. The website will create a list of organic keywords that the post currently ranks for, as well as volume and position information.
Tip 3. Evaluate your title tags and meta-descriptions for keywords
Ensure your tags match the body of the blog’s contentand that they are targeting the right keyword phrases. Ensureyour descriptions are effective in getting searchers to click on your site.
Tip 4. Update to be on topic – both in terms of relevance and accuracy
Although metrics play an important part in deciding which old blog posts to update, they are not the only aspect that you should consider in your review. Consider updating blog posts based on trending topics.Do some research and find out what’s new and exciting. If you have already covered a particular topic that is currently a trend or a topic of conversation within your industry, updating it for SEO is often a better option than publishing a new post that Google could mark as duplicate content.
If you reference any facts or numbers, check to see if more recent stats are available. If there’s a new expert in the field, add in a quote from them.
Tip 5. Update imagery
Switch out any stock photos that may look out of date, or now out of keeping.
Tip 6. Ensure the old – blends with the new
Ensure additional keywords, new facts and figures all transition nicely into the older content. It’s also worth checking old links to ensure they’re still functional – but also relevant. But whatever you do – do not change or update the URL of the existing blog post. An established URL can help the post continue to rank for certain keywords!
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