Have you ever wondered why millions of people keep flocking to buy iPhones that are largely just revisions of their predecessors, or why Disney’s recent remakes of old favourites like The Lion King and Aladdin are box office gold? Simple: the fundamentals of quality are already there.
For this reason, bringing a new sheen to well-worn content can reap surprisingly good returns. However, that success depends on you knowing exactly what you are doing, as these tips attest…
Revamp and expand the content, rather than just rearrange a few words
Online, you might have a large archive of previously published content which you can revise, expand and republish. However, make sure that the changes are genuinely meaningful, rather than simply a case of existing words or paragraphs moved around like musical chairs.
Some bloggers have tried such tactics due to Google’s reported love of refreshed content, but the search engine can’t be fooled that easily. With that extra content needs to come enhanced value.
Make traditionally popular pieces more timely
If certain posts on your site’s blog still attract a steady stream of visits but haven’t been updated for a while, this buoyant popularity could be under threat. For this reason, you should use web analytics tools like Google to find pieces which have reached high viewership but warrant updating.
Perhaps some of the statistics are from 2013 and could be replaced with 2019 figures, or particular passages recommend services or products that have since been superseded by others.
Know what not to change, too
As longer pieces often rank higher in search engine results, you could see sense in adding much more information than what you take away. However, if the piece in question has already sourced a lot of SEO juice through its current URL, then you should leave that URL intact.
The title might need revising, but try to preserve the keyword phrase. You should also change the displayed publication date and time, but remember to add a disclaimer indicating that this was an older piece published on a particular date and since updated.
Mix up how you communicate the content
As many of us differ in how they learn most effectively, it pays to adapt old content into various new formats. From a single press release, for example, you could get a blog post, posts across social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and a YouTube video.
Put together an e-book to distribute for free
If many of your old blog posts tend to focus on similar subjects, you could gather together content from those pieces and put it into a single e-book. Consider sprucing up its digital pages with imagery and an index before offering the e-book for free to people who sign up to your emailing list.
When combing through your old textual content, you might spot spelling or grammatical errors here and there. However, rest assured that our SEO copywriters can correct all of those little discrepancies while modernising and repurposing that material on your behalf.
