The value of content in the perspective of marketing cannot be overstated. It drives traffic to your website, gets you social shares and helps with your search engine rankings. This is why many brands treat content as an investment, hiring professional content writing services so they always have something to publish on their Melbourne business’ website.
However, producing quality content for marketing purposes is not easy. Apart from hours of research, content writing requires balancing between marketing your brand and writing about topics interesting enough for your readers to click on and read. Then you have to repeat the process all over again for your next blog post.
All these you do to increase your search engine rankings and convert readers into paying customers. Over time, though, it may seem like you’ve covered every topic imaginable. So, what else can you write about? We suggest looking backwards and mining your blog archives.
Republishing Old Blog Posts: Why Do It?
As established earlier, coming up with great content can be a challenge. So, instead of producing subpar content or struggling to come up with new ideas, updating the blogs you already have will save you time and money.
What’s more, utilising the same keywords for blog posts can hurt your chances of ranking on search engines. Google, for example, usually only shows results from different websites for a specific search query. If you have a high domain authority, you might get away with two results for the same query. If you’re focusing on similar keywords or topics for several posts, you’re essentially competing with yourself for the limited space on search engine results pages.
Another reason to update your old blogs is that some information might be outdated. Now, you might ask, “What does it matter? Those posts are old and no one will see them anyway.” You’re wrong. If the content is well-written, it can still rank high months or years after it was first published, which means readers may still stumble upon it.
So, to eliminate the possibility of cannibalising your own content by writing about similar topics or keywords with updated information, the best move is to republish your old posts.
How to Decide Which Posts to Republish
So, you’ve decided that updating and republishing your content is the right move for your website’s blog. With hundreds of posts in your archive, how do you choose which ones to update? Here are a few things to consider:
1. Identify your top-performing posts
Old articles that still receive a lot of traffic means readers are finding it useful. The only thing you can do is strengthen them by polishing the writing and updating the information you presented. You can identify these posts by looking at the ones with the most traffic, inbound links and social shares.
2. Consider posts that are relevant to current trending topics
Apart from blogs that are well-performing based on metrics, blogs that may be relevant to current trends are also worth revisiting. Now, for example, the world is grappling with a pandemic.
Depending on your industry, you may have written about topics relevant to the current situation, such as how to stay productive while working from home, or topics that are related to hygiene. By polishing and republishing these types of content now, you’re producing something relevant to the readers, making them more likely to click and read.
Don’t let old content go to waste. Repurpose them today and see your blog and website perform better.
