Revamp, Repurpose Your Old Contents to Boost SEO

You spent hours and even days to create a wonderful piece of content. You didn’t do that just to get a few thousand views, did you?

I mean, clearly, your effort is worth much more than this small number, right?

Comes in content revamping and repurposing—the backbone of content marketing, also an important (but ignored) part of on-page SEO techniques.

The successful bloggers and industry experts don’t really write every day. Most days, they push their old contents like new ones, which helps them gain significant traffic through search engines and social channels.

And it is something you should err, must do too.

Let’s first understand the basics.

Table of Contents hide

What does content revamp means?

What does repurpose content mean?

When to repurpose content and when to revamp or republish it?

What does content revamp means?

It is the process of updating your old content, making minor tweaks, changing its date from its original to the latest one, and then distributing it on various channels.

In the simplest form, it is basically republishing an existing article with a new date.

You can make minor changes in the content. For example, you can introduce new keywords, include anchor texts, tweak its Meta descriptions, make changes in its heading, add new images and so forth.

Once done revamping and modifying, update the publish date of the article to the latest one and then fetch the URL to Google and Bing.

That’s it!

The search bots will now crawl the piece of content, check the latest date, treat it as fresh and prioritize it high on SERP. This can significantly improve not just your ranking but also Click-Through Rate.

I personally republish my old contents daily with slight modifications in anchor text for internal links. This helps me easily bring hundreds of new readers to posts that I have written months back.

Tips:

When you’re unable to publish new content, republish the old one.
Pick an article that’s underperforming. Modify it with better keywords, headlines and Meta keywords.
Make sure the facts and figures in it are up-to-date.
Don’t forget to fetch the revamped content on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster.

Content revamping only takes 10-15 minutes. And it can bring a miraculous boost to your organic traffic by having search engines crawl and find fresh content on your blog more frequently.

What does repurpose content mean?

Repurposing your content is much more than just refining your old one with fresh information.

While content revamping focuses more on bringing organic visitors, repurposing is more about engaging a segment to fulfill a different objective.

Aside from adding the latest facts and figures, the process of revamping includes changing the format and goal of the content.

Let’s take an example.

Say you wrote a piece on “how to beat procrastination?” At the time of its original publish date, you wrote it to attract readers and then gain subscribers with suitable Call-To-Action.

Now, after a few months you have launched a premium course on how to beat procrastination.

What you can do now is instead of writing an entirely new content to generate leads, you simply repurpose your original content “how to beat procrastination” into, say, eBook, audio or presentation format with slight changes in the body to better target your different segments of the course, from students to working professionals.

First, via this post, you wanted to bring subscribers. Now, you want to bring qualified leads to sell your course.

You just repurposed the article.

Of course, the example is quite simple. You can use the strategy of content repurposing in seamless ways to generate more value from your old contents, to achieve different goals and to reach more audience that may have missed your original article.

It’s very evident why you should repurpose content:

1) It saves a lot of your time.

2) Your old content (and efforts) become much more valuable.

3) You get more traffic and leads, thanks to the repurposed, highly targeted and comprehensive content.

Tips:

Pick a pillar content that is really great and has brought good traffic.
Be extremely clear on what different goal you want to achieve.
Know which specific segment you want to target.
Select the content format you want to repurpose the original content into.

When to repurpose content and when to revamp or republish it?

This question isn’t really that complicated.

The days you’re not publishing any new content, republish the old ones.

This would keep your regular visitors engaged, as well as maintain the blog’s crawl rate and flow of organic traffic.

Revamping is done when you want the same content to target the same audience and fulfill the same purpose.

It does require a few changes from time to time. But it caters the same goals why it was created in the first place.

On the other hand, repurposing content should be done when you want to pursue a different goal and target a different (or broader) audience base.

Of course, in this process, a lot of thinking and planning needs to go. But in the end, it would all come down to the basic question—why do you want to repurpose your content:

Is it to get more traffic?
Is it to gain more subscribers?
Is it to generate more leads?
Is it to sell your new product?

Depending on these goals should you decide whether or not and how to repurpose your content. The reused content could turn into any format, from videos and webinars to eBook to presentation to infographics.

Revamping and repurposing blog content is a major part of on-page SEO and content marketing strategy that, directly and indirectly, affects your blog traffic. They are also an ignored technique among the majority of bloggers.

Don’t be one of these bloggers. Be like 29 percent of leading marketers who reuse and repurpose their contents systematically.

This is a part of 9-post series on Ignored SEO Techniques. Click below and read more: