Revive Your Older Content with these 11 Strategies
5 min readYou might be putting in a lot of time and effort to create new content. But it is equally important to update the older ones to remain relevant and provide useful information. Outdated content not only harms the SEO rankings but also affects your brand image. But you can prevent that by refreshing old content. There are many reliable content marketing services providers to help you with that.
Updating older content with new texts and images can increase organic traffic by up to 106 percent. Using the strategy, Siege Media and Search Engine Journal increased organic traffic by over 60 percent and 50 percent. It also results in improved search engine rankings, more audience engagement, good content performance, and many more. Here are 11 strategies to update older content.
1. Update Keywords and Meta Description
Over a period of time, search patterns change. As people enter new terms in their searches, the older keyword rankings get lower. To stay updated, always research for new keywords and list the most popular ones. After that, go to the content and replace the outdated keywords with new ones. Also, look into your meta description and ensure that it presents an accurate preview of the webpage. If you feel that it can be better, make the necessary changes.
2. Check for Readability
Look into your content and find out if it is hard to read or understand. Search for jargon and difficult terms and replace those with simpler synonyms. If you find any long sentences, break them up into shorter ones. An ideal sentence length is 15-20 words. Avoid fancy fonts and stick to the conventional ones that are easy to read and pleasing to the eyes. Use heading tags to separate sections and use white spaces to make the content look clean.
3. Look for Outdated Content
The world is changing rapidly, and some content you wrote in the past may not be relevant today. That can be profiles of former employees, blog posts on products or services you no longer offer, old and job postings. Look for outdated content and delete those.
4. Update Content and Add More Information
The might be some older content that is relevant and need some updates. Look into such content that needs to be updated and add new information. Also, look out for the articles and posts that are shorter in length. Consider adding more information to make them informative and useful for readers. Depending on the content, you can add frequently asked questions, tips and tricks, pros and cons, and more. Also, some content may need editing and trimming. Take the help of a professional editor to make it more crisp and clear. Taking the help of professional content marketing services can be useful in this step.
5. Create New Formats Out of Older Posts
Consider creating new formats out of high-quality older content. Infographics are best to repurpose old content. They derive complex data and statistics from text content and present those in pictures and illustrations. Apart from it, you can choose many formats to give the older content a new lease of life.
6. Update The Design and Make Your Page Mobile-friendly
Make your content engaging and well structured by using bullet points and tweaking the design. A good design will enable more readers to read your content and ensure that your page is optimized for mobile. A majority of web browsers use their mobile devices to surf the internet and access content. A mobile-friendly page will give your visitors an excellent user experience and encourage them to visit your site more often.
7. Update Links
The link to an older webpage has earned some rankings and value. If you create an entirely new page, you will be wiping the slate clean. But by updating the link, you can protect its ranking and link value. While updating an old URL, ensure that you redirect the old links to the new ones by using a 301 redirect.
8. Link Older Content to New Ones
Many of your older articles and blog posts can serve as an excellent reference for your latest content. When you create new content, look for ways to link the URLs of your previous related content to it. Ideally, every blog post should have at least one backlink to your previous blog posts. That will provide readers with more information and enable them to go through your past works.
9. Republish Your Older Content on Third-party Websites
Many third-party websites allow you to republish your older content on their platforms. Some of them are:
- Quora: This is a popular question-and-answer platform that enables you to respond to users’ questions. Paste an extract from any old content and provide its URL.
- Reddit: Like in Quora, you can search relevant questions on the platform, take an excerpt of your content, and paste its URL.
- Medium: Using this self-publishing platform, you can repost the old content and get views from your followers.
- LinkedIn: The professional network platform enables you to repost the previous content.
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10. Re-post and Re-promote
Social media gives you immense opportunities to re-post and re-promote your older content and show it to new followers. You can post the key points and takeaways of the content in the caption and provide the URL to drive traffic to your website. This will increase engagement, bring new mentions, and promote your brand. A reliable digital marketing services provider can help you market older content on social media and other platforms.
11. Create a Content Round-up
Creating a round-up of older posts and articles on a related topic is one of the most effective ways to refresh your content. It can be a compilation of both new and old content. Ensure that you have optimized the older content and made it more relevant for your audience. Consider creating round-ups such as ‘Most popular blogs in 2021,’ ‘Our best blogs on (topic) of all time,’ ‘Top 21 blog posts of 2021,’ and more.
In Sum,
Refreshing older content is as crucial as creating new ones. Some old articles and posts can perform better and provide useful information. You just need to find those and update them so that they keep up with the changing times.