How to repurpose old content to boost your SEO

Any good SEO strategy incorporates content. The content on your site is what Google crawlers read through to ascertain what your site is about, what it’s relevant for, and which searches it can help with. Part of this includes ‘fresh’ content, information that Google crawlers know is new to the site. The more time your content spends onsite, the less fresh it appears and the less value it has. 

With fresh content, the Google Crawlers see more relevance and tend to come back more frequently to recrawl. Nevertheless, content is a time intensive process. To be any good for Google, the content you write needs to be keyword optimised, relevant, well written and have a reasonably long word count. On an ongoing basis, a high quality content strategy is a commitment. A great way to alleviate the impact of this is to repurpose old content into new, more valuable content. 

As with everything in SEO, this process is all about strategy and data. Here’s how to repurpose your old content into an SEO supporting act.

Find the blogs that are working for you 

There’s no point spending a lot of time on a blog that’s not working for your audience. Take a look at your Google Analytics and see which blogs bring in traffic, both now and when they were first launched. Ideally, choose something that’s been a consistent source of traffic for a while. Make sure that, if it’s date specific, that there’s something new to say or go for something different. The goal with repurposing is to add value. 

Take a look at your title

The title is the first, and sometimes only, thing that a user sees that enables them to decide if they want to click. If it wasn’t a ‘hook’ before, change it up and make sure that it’s something that draws people in. 

Spring clean the spelling and grammar

Spelling and grammar isn’t a ranking factor, but it’s definitely a credibility and usability factor for anybody reading the blog. User behaviour can make a huge difference to rankings because Google knows how long people are spending on the page. If it’s a long time, they know that you’re delivering what a searcher is looking for. 

Update any outdated info 

The goal of this exercise isn’t to gain SEO benefits – that’s a by-product of providing your users with a valuable blog. Have a quick read through and make sure that all the information is still correct and can’t be replaced with something better. 

Replace links 

You might have linked to pages or resources that are either not there or no longer the best reference point. Have a quick look through to make sure that everything you’ve linked to is still something you’d recommend, and that everything works the way it should. 

Review your keywords

Perhaps you’ve found a keyword recently that’s been working really well. It’s worth inputting this into your blog instead of keeping the optimisation that could be a few years old. It’s also a good idea to look in Search Console and find the keywords that are bringing people to your site, so that you can support them with a blog. 

Update the publication date

Although Google uses incredibly clever algorithms, it’s still reading the data you give it. Even if you change the content, the best way to signal to Google that something is new is to change the date to show that it’s been published recently. On platforms such as WordPress, this is a quick and easy process. If all you’re changing is one part of the information, you can simply add a dated update instead. 

Futureproof by choosing evergreen titles

If repurposing content is a good strategy for you, plan ahead and choose blog titles that will always be points of pain. 

Reshare on social 

You can’t expect your audience to know that you’ve refreshed your content if you don’t share it again! Make sure that you push your new blog out to social media and any other channels that are a traffic stream for you. 

Update the URL with the title and put in a redirect

Don’t make the mistake of just reposting an old URL. Refresh the URL with the new title and make sure that you’ve put in a redirect so that everybody looking for that post gets to see the newest version.

And while we’re here…

DON’T

• Copy and paste it into a new blog without removing the old one as this will flag as duplicate content
• ‘Borrow’ anybody else’s content
• Forget to do a broken link check on your site in case you’ve missed any