Creating engaging content that’s SEO savvy for your website/blog can take up a considerable amount of time. Especially if you’re also running a business. Because of this sometimes your online content can get pushed to the side. However, it’s vital for any business that their website and blog tells their audience more about them, their brand and what they do. Everybody’s heard of writers block and it can occur often when creating fresh content too. There’ll come a point when you’ll feel that you’re all out of ideas and that you’re repeating yourself every time you create content. If you’re creating content you’ll probably find that there are certain pieces that you love and are really proud of, maybe you feel like they’re not as optimised and as polished as you’d like though. We’ve got good news for you.
There are certain things that Google loves and others that it hates. Thankfully, Google rewards you when you republish and optimise your previous content. If you’re wondering why and how, keep reading!
“74% of companies indicate that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity” – Curata
The Benefits To Your Market
Optimising your content benefits your buyers and those visiting your site. They’re the most important people after all. Giving them content that’s outdated does them, or you, no favours. When changes occur it will probably leave you to view some of your content as outdated, irrelevant or useless. Alter your mindset and see this as opportunity to update and republish your existing content. Your blog should be full of current, relevant information that serves a purpose to your audience. It shouldn’t contain any information that isn’t useful to them. To achieve this, you need to be optimising your content to create a relevant feed of information that your audience wants to engage with.
Why Should You Be Optimising and Republishing?
Think about that blog post that you love, that got floods of engagement and created conversions. Google has already indexed it. Instead of completely removing it and creating an entirely new post, you should be updating it and optimising it. Don’t undo the work you did to create an effective piece of content by scrapping your links, keywords and comments.
Now let’s discuss Google’s algorithm and how it rewards website that update their existing content. This is an SEO technique that a lot of companies overlook and instead start fresh with every piece of content in their efforts to rank higher in the search engines.
Quality Over Quantity
In an age of articles, videos and everything in between flooding the internet we’re always being constantly bombarded with content. The power of content marketing has become increasingly evident and everybody is streaming their efforts into it. There’s more content out there than we could ever need, so it’s about making sure that yours is the most appealing to your audience. If you take a look at your competitors content and it’s weak then you can use this to your advantage. Mirror their topics and create (preferably update existing) content that is more beneficial to your target audience.
Google and Its Constant Testing
Within the industry, it’s common knowledge the Google Algorithm is constantly altering. When Google crawls online content it’s doing so to both categorise and analyse it. Google’s bots are looking to find which pieces of content are most effective and relevant for each topic. If your blog piece is engaging and serves a purpose to your reader, they will be on your site for longer because they’re reading your content. When Google sees that people are spending more time on one site than on another, it views it as having more authority and in turn rank it higher.
As you begin optimising content you’ll learn more and more about the best ways to do it and what works for you (and Google). You’ll be able to see which titles work the best, the formats which perform most effectively and other ways to increase the effectiveness of your content. Every time you update content, Google registers that you’ve updated your website. This in itself gives you more authority in the rankings.
Teaching Google About What You Do
When you republish content you’re also teaching Google about what you do and where your expertise lies. As you republish more and more Google will realise that you’re publishing substantial amounts of content and will consider that when determining your ranking.
As well as knowing your expertise, Google will learn about the articles which people visit your site for most. As time passes, Google will work out the topics that your readers see you as being useful for. This means that when somebody types a query into Google relating to your topic that they’ll be shown your article. This gives you both ranking authority and the opportunity to engage with people who are interested in your content topics.
Republishing The Right Way
Let’s discuss republishing the content that Google actually looks for. Work with your SEO team to carefully select the right posts. Your most popular posts and content pieces need to be updated and fully optimised. Your digital marketing agency will give their efforts to thorough Google Analytics to allow you insight into which posts are your best ones.
Make sure the actual content is faultless. Check for spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Make sure your images are appropriate, relevant and appealing to your audience. When you’re writing content, keep your goals in mind to make sure that you’re directing your content towards achieving them.
The last step is to drive your focus to promoting your new (old) content. Linking it on your social accounts is the most obvious way and it really does work. If you send a newsletter you should be putting your updated pieces there too.
Rather than just updating the same piece, you could create several smaller pieces of content around the same topic. Maybe you could create a video series or an infographic to ensure you’re appealing to everybody in your audience.
Finally…
Hopefully this piece has helped you gain some understanding on how and why you should be republishing your existing content. Instead of beating yourself up about fresh content, take some time to analyse your existing pieces and think about how to repurpose them.
As an experienced digital marketing agency, we provide full content marketing services. To work with a creative team with a passion for gaining results for our clients, get in touch today!
