If you’re internet-savvy, you may be wondering what bloggers and content writers do with their old blog posts.
Blogging focused mainly on stay-at-home moms to post about their favorite recipes or fun vacations to take with the kids. Then blogging started to evolve. Businesses, big and small, began to take advantage of what blogging can do for their SEO for rankings to drive more traffic to their website, and well, the rest is history. Now more than ever, there are pages and pages of old blogs that are still active; yet, taking up space. So, you may wonder what you can do with your old blogs. Continue reading to see how optimizing old blogs can save time and increase your bottom line.
Why Is Optimizing Old Blog Posts Important?
It may sound odd to reuse blogs from five or ten years ago, but it’s the type of blog that may be useful, not how many. Back in the early 2000s, content managers were more concerned with getting quantity, not quality. Many old posts have been buried, so it’s becoming harder to keep an inventory of the content. Now, Google and other search engines are much more concerned with the quality of the content than quantity. While having a large amount of really great content is perfectly fine, having a large amount of subpar content will ultimately hurt your SEO rankings in the long run.
Your content represents your brand at the end of the day, which means your content and blog posts have to stand for what you stand for. Here are the main ways optimizing your old blogs will help your brand:
- Ensures value for users and the business
- It gives your collection of content a more precise topical focus
- It makes it more easily discoverable
- It brings current-day freshness to an otherwise old post
Taking Inventory
The first step to any sort of improvement is to take inventory of all your content. Your priority should be to take thorough stock of all your content. Cybervise recommends using a few different tools that you can use to gather all your data. These methods include exporting a database field or getting URLs from Google Analytics data, using Webmaster Tools, or using Screaming Frog for a full scan of your website. All of these tools are both free and helpful, and while you may not get a perfect-looking report, it sure beats having to go through every single blog post yourself!
What to Keep
Now that you know how many blogs you have and what they are about, it’s time to identify what to keep. When going through this process, you should be asking yourself the following questions:
- Is the blog helpful and informative? – Does it answer the question that first brought the reader to your page? If yes, keep it and optimize it for future readers.
- Does the blog provide any value to my business? – Don’t waste your time writing and rewriting old blog posts if they aren’t providing value for your business.
- Is the content great? Or at the very least, could it be great? – If it is, keep it! If not, assess whether it’s worth keeping and editing or getting rid of it altogether.
- How does this blog relate to my business? – If it’s not related to your business, it won’t lead to conversion; consider putting this one in the archives.
- Does this blog push the reader through the sales funnel to a call to action? – If not, how can I make it do so? If it does, is the call to action still relevant?
- Does my blog have content that’s old and outdated? – If so, it might not be worth it to rewrite it altogether. You may want to consider removing it and starting fresh.
- Does this post have keywords that are still relevant today? – If not, you can still keep the blog, but do some keyword refreshing. However, if the topic isn’t relevant, you should probably get rid of it.
Improve, Expand, Update
Get out your magnifying glass, so to speak, and go through the content with a fine tooth-comb. Target your content for grammar and flow, as well as observe whether it has a clear point, targets a specific topic, and is in the appropriate language. Next, ensure your content has the technical improvements it may need, including alt text, relevant backlinks, and design aspects. There are so many ways to update an old blog other than using your standard editing techniques; make sure to keep that in mind so you can get the results!
Some ideas to update or expand your post might include writing from a different perspective, including newer data, more recent developments, or changed opinions. Conversely, you could add a video, infographic, imagery, or audio content to expand the content.
Promote Your Blog with REVITY Marketing Agency
Once your old blog posts have been repurposed or recycled, it only makes sense to promote them as best as possible. This could include sharing it on social media channels, redating it, or maybe some external promotion using a marketing agency.
At REVITY, we go a step further by doing it all. We can optimize, research, and write new blogs and content for you that is not only engaging but will drive traffic that leads to conversion. Our specialists know just what it takes to create content that drives results. As a full-service agency, we also do SEO, design, social promoting, and everything else that will lead to more revenue for your company. Located in Utah and serving clients worldwide, we are dedicated to working hard for each of our clients and celebrating their successes along the way. Contact us today to learn more about us and for a free proposal!
