Halloween 2020 Special: Bringing Content for SEO Back From the Dead

Halloween is here already and if 2020 wasn’t spooky enough, WEBITMD proposes something that some marketers might find scary (not to say, utterly useless): bring old content for SEO back from the dead. What do we mean by that? No need for witchery, for sure! But actually bring to the light the value of revising and repurposing your old content.

Having new blog posts and landing pages periodically is certainly a good, elemental SEO practice. But it is equally important to review the content that you already posted. Especially if you’ve been posting blogs for a while. It is very likely that you already have a good piece of content that is leading good traffic; but maybe you published it in 2018. Keeping it impactful and relevant by updating it can have a bigger than you think impact on both your audience and SEO.

So how to choose among all those articles? Which ones should you choose to come back from the dead? How should you do that? Read more; it won’t bite!

What Type of Content for SEO Should You Bring Back To Life?

The first step on prioritizing which content for SEO to review is to check how it is performing. Metrics like page views, bounce rate or the average time on page are incredibly valuable at the moment of determining which blogs should you update or repurpose. Google Analytics and Hubspot are two very useful sources of such data. In fact, Hubspot’s SEO Tool allows you to create topic clusters linking your landing pages with keyword-related content. You can get information like bounce rate, sessions and their average length while also organizing your blogs better.

Once you detect your best performing articles, it’s time to analyze them. How contemporary are their topics? There’s a figure in marketing and journalism that is the evergreen content. This is blogs and other informational pieces that are based on topics that are continually relevant. Their own nature keeps them fresh and interesting to audiences. Some types of evergreen content are: top lists, ‘how to’ tutorials, or expert tips. A good example of evergreen content is our original article ‘The Right Way To Use Lookalike Audiences on Facebook Ads’ by WEBITMD’s Director of Paid Media Matt Moore! It was written in 2018 and to this date it’s among our most visited articles.

Does this mean that you should only focus on evergreen content? Not really. Some other articles that are more newsy, or into current trends and topics (yeah, like the freakin’ COVID-19!) can still be valuable and keep on driving traffic after the years. In those cases, you can always update it with new information, new images, updated infographics, videos, and more.  

So it’s not a matter of building a Frankenstein monster with old and new parts; but actually make a new piece of content out of the one you already worked on a while ago.

How Do You Repurpose Your Old Content?

So once you chose the articles and know their nature, the next step into reviving them is to contemplate both the written content per-se and all their aspects of technical on-site optimization:

• Article’s categories and tags
• Metadata
• Internal and external link building
• Images alt tags
• Subheadings

In my personal experience I’ve seen many clients having really good articles posted on their websites, but found out that those articles had broken images, dead links, no subheadings, etc. Something as common as a site update can generate such mess. Having a periodic review of old content for SEO can correct that and make such content stay current and fresh for both audiences and search engines. 

The repurposing doesn’t actually end in the blog post per-se. They can be seized in multiple platforms of your overall digital marketing strategy. You can generate visual assets like infographics or a video out of an old blog, and even use such visual content to enrich and update your old blog. Your updated blogs can also be re-posted on all social media platforms, shared on email blasts, or used to enrich your YouTube videos’ descriptions; all this being a great source of backlinks.

Reviewing and repurposing content for SEO is part of WEBITMD’s overall SEO offering. We understand how important it is to refresh and re-use your content and we go the extra mile to make the best out of it. Contact us to learn more about how we can make your business grow by using robust, tailored strategies and avoid trick or treating your organic rankings!