In the “career” of a blogger, there are always those articles that are better accepted by readers: they receive more traffic and are always active. Here, for example, we never fail to quote top posts whenever possible. These are the types of old posts that need to be optimized. In this guide, I’ll show you how to repurpose old content on your blog and leverage it to get more traffic.
How to Repurpose Old Content on your Blog
The most important articles on your blog generally receive a high rate of visits, especially from search engines. But they can be further optimized so that you can make the most of this traffic generation capability that such old posts (still) provide.
These techniques involve a little SEO and rewriting of your old posts, but nothing that should take you more than 20 to 30 minutes for each article. I will try to explain the main techniques that you can use to repurpose your old content following a single line of thought and easily increase engagement on your blog.
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But before we dive into the juicy stuff, you will need to pick the right content to repurpose. Consider an article that has already received some substantial organic visits from Google and has a good bounce rate.
Optimize Keywords
I’ve talked about Keyword Optimization here several times. Usually, when writing blog content, we don’t give much thought into keyword research, perhaps because we write for readers, not bots and crawlers. But striking a balance is important here.
Keywords are crucial in generating organic traffic to your website. Thus, when re-optimizing and repurposing an old blog post, you may end up discovering new keywords to use, much more attractive and updated than those already used.
To do this, go to the Google Keyword Planner tool and do some synonym searches for the keywords you previously used in your old article. When choosing these new keywords, be sure that you can actually rank competitively on search for these keywords. You can do this by analyzing the Keyword SEO Difficulty (SD) using Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest tool.
Rewrite the Article
Now that we have fresh keywords with a fairly low SEO Difficulty, we need to optimize our old and performing posts for these keywords. You will want to incorporate the keywords in the following parts of your old post: Title, Introduction, Last paragraph, Middle of the content (as many repetitions and variations as you can, as long as your text remains well-read), and Subtitles (if any).
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For long articles (400+ words), 5 to 8 repetitions of the main keyword can be used. If your website is a personal blog, keyword repetition may become unrealistic for certain posts, but that doesn’t mean you can’t at least choose a main keyword a little better and put it at some points in your old post, or replace existing keywords for better ones.
Note: Rewriting/Repurposing old content is different from article spinning. Google constantly condemns article spinning and there’s a very good chance that you will end up hurting your website rankings rather than improve it if you spin your old content.
Links Pointing to the Old Post
After optimizing keywords within your article, the next step to repurpose old content is to revisit other articles with the same context. This is basically the art of link building. For best results, you can use your new main keyword in the other posts as an anchor text with a link pointing to the old post you are optimizing.
When Google crawls your related posts and encounters the new keyword referenced several times with an embedded link to your old post, that immediately establishes the article you are optimizing as an article with some authority. This is good news.
Another alternative approach to this method is by using Related Posts and interlinking them as much as possible. Internal links greatly increase the power of an article and keywords used as anchor texts.
Share on Social Media
While most social media platforms do not allow do-follow external links, sharing your updated post on your social pages might get you some good traffic, especially if the title and featured image are quirky enough. Even more interesting, if you interlinked your posts properly, your readers will be caught in a loop, navigating around various related articles within your blog.
This is particularly helpful in getting your bounce rate at an optimum. So once again, the art of link building is important. Sharing on social media baits your readers, and interlinking keeps them glued to your content.
Improve the Existing Content
Whenever I go through a really old post (that was written at least 3 months ago), I almost always find a lot to improve: additional ideas, bases for creating new sessions, and so on. This is normal for people who are constantly updating themselves within the content they write about.
So, optimize your old content and also take the time to rank for some new keywords, in case you create a new important session within your post. To do this, do a new keyword search (go back to the first step) and find some that are very easy to rank (but that generate some traffic). After all, it is something secondary to achieve, such as a bonus and, therefore, it cannot be very difficult to rank.
Links to Other Blogs
That’s right: since you have increased your content, you can also mention some related links that are on other blogs. Thus, you will be collecting links to your content, explained in the fifth step, because you will probably have a new trackback on the blog in question.
Loyalty the Reader
Whenever you want to repurpose old content, it helps to remember the cliched mantra – no blogger lives by writing alone. Since your post may look better than the previous one, it may be interesting to direct these new visitors to generate more revenue, right?
Interlinking and Bounce Rate
As I mentioned earlier, one of the best techniques to improve and repurpose old content is to decrease the Bounce Rate it maintains, especially if it is too high. To do this, simply “drip” some links pointing to other posts, within your content. A very high Bounce Rate can be dictated mainly by the lack of internal links and a large number of external links, not only within your posts but also in another part of your blog, say your sidebar.
With these tips, your blog steadily grows and remains healthy over time, even if you optimize a few posts heavily. Follow the same ideas whenever you can and see how the differences really arise!
