The task of developing high-quality online marketing content to create an effective content marketing strategy for your business is no small task these days.
Content marketers often feel a deep pressure to produce consistent, high-quality content to consistently attract readers and prospects. This can lead to burnout, frustration, poor execution, or all of the above. As you and your marketing team work through the content creation process, it’s important to produce consistent content. But sometimes, new content ideas run dry, so what do you do? How do you leverage existing content?
Recycling Content as a Way to Improve SEO
Content recycling involves revitalizing key topics, improving your on-page SEO strategy, improving search engine results, and updating your statistics and data. This marketing technique can be incredibly effective if your goal is to drive traffic and increase conversions (which is everyone’s goal, right?).
Hubspot conducted their own research on content recycling, and their findings show that when done correctly, this strategy can be very effective. In fact, when they updated and recycled their old content, they saw a 240% increase in conversion rates and attracted three times more leads than before. Obviously, results like that are croatia telephone number data impressive. So how do you make sure your marketing team is recycling content the right way? Let’s take a look at ways to recycle content.
1. Think about which content is worth recycling
This may seem like an thin content – what is it and how to avoid it? obvious first step, but it’s important for your marketing team to be very specific and strategic about the content that needs to be changed. There’s no point in rehashing an older blog post that didn’t engage at all because the subject matter clearly wasn’t relevant to your target audience. Your marketing team needs to have the right data on past content, including engagement rates, reach, click-through rates, and ROI, to help decide what copy would be ideal.
2. Create an infographic
Got a blog post full of statistics or data? Consider creating an infographic. Consumers appreciate visuals, so creating a summary of the most striking statistics from your posts is a new, engaging way to add meaning to your content. You can embed these infographics in your blog post, but they can also be repurposed and shared on social media.
3. Update your keyword usage
If your content is a few years old, it may have been created when keyword stuffing (using keywords as often as possible) was still an effective SEO trick. Today, Google is cracking down on overused keywords, so edit your content as needed to use your keywords and variants naturally. You can also update your content and add new phrases.
4. Change the date and add an update note
If your content includes a date, such as a blog post, add an “editor’s note” that the post has been updated to reassure readers that the information is current. You may also want to consider removing the date altogether if your content was added a long time ago.
5. Update Links
Nothing screams “old content” like outdated data or a hyperlink that leads to content from 2010 or worse—a 404 page. Whenever you cite statistics, chances are there are more recent ones than the ones you used. Find them and use them. The same goes for links. You may have published better content recently, so link to that instead.
Why is it worth recycling content?
This keeps your brand relevant. Just because you haven’t added new content for a while doesn’t mean people aren’t finding those old blogs conduit china and e-books through search engines and old links. Good content will continue to attract attention and build a good reputation for your brand.
Google rewards freshness. And so do searchers. In 2011, Google introduced the freshness factor into its ranking algorithm. It makes sense—high-quality, valuable content that’s fresh and relevant is exactly what Google wants to serve up to search engines. Simple enough, right?
We build on the existing potential that the post has already accumulated . In other words, you start with a post that already has some level of page authority and just improve on it, rather than starting from scratch.
Why is content recycling more important now than ever?
These days we have a problem with content overload. Just look at the graph below which shows the number of new blog posts published on the WordPress blogging platform each month since October 2006. 58 million in May! And that’s just on WordPress – it doesn’t even take into account posts published on other blogging platforms.
wordpress new posts chart
As more and more businesses have begun to recognize the importance of content marketing, more content is being created. As the supply increases, so does the competition to find that content online.
“The supply of content is growing, but the demand is static.” In other words, the people who consume all of this content will “consume” only that much and no more. Their demand does not grow with the supply.
As a result, it’s estimated that around 50% of enterprise content goes completely untapped. So for marketers who have been blogging consistently for some time and are tasked with growing and scaling their blogs, the answer can’t be to simply increase content production in proportion to the growth goals they need to achieve.
This is why optimizing your older content becomes so important.