If you’re operating a unique niche business, and your website is packed with relevant articles relating to said business, then you should definitely be recycling your old content. A good content marketing plan consists of not only creating new content, but of recycling what you already have and putting a fresh, updated twist on it.
It’s important to revisit old content to help with improving your overall SEO. By restructuring your meta information and keywords, you can increase your chances of improving your overall ranking in SERPs (search engine results pages). Once you’ve updated the article’s date or added a note, you’ll be letting Google know that you’ve refreshed that content. Additionally, you can backlink to newer articles and improve your off-site SEO.
Other benefits include improving your blog overall and earning the trust of your customers by presenting them with high-quality, relevant information.
Here are a few ways you can repurpose your old content:
Use Old Articles to Create New Ones
This is one of the best ways to recycle your old content. The ideas are already right in front of you, but it’s up to you to make them new and fresh, while still educating your audience on a relevant topic. You might consider taking an article with several components (like a how-to or “5 ways”) and breaking down each component individually.
If a topic is still relevant and your customers are still interested in learning more about it, then repurposing old articles makes sense. If you have any articles in mind already that you know have performed really well, it might be best to start there.
Write a Follow-up
If you’re a pioneer in your industry, then you likely know what your customers are most interested in learning more about. Think of some of the more complicated or popular articles you’ve written and create a follow-up article that goes into more detail about the topic. Or, if you can think of a particular trend or component of your business that’s changed over time, you can revisit that article and discuss the transformation from then until now.
Always make sure to add a “part 2” so that your audience knows that you’re building off an older article. This also provides the added benefit of backlinking to the older article. Simply add in, “To view the original post, click here.”
Turn Blogs into Podcasts
Podcasts have become an important piece of marketing content for small businesses. They provide a great way to tell your business’s story and dive into more specific details about the most unique components of your business. Listening can also sometimes be more beneficial than reading and can create a more personalized feel for your customers.
Blogs are a great platform for both promoting podcasts, as well as finding information that can be used to create new podcasts. If you can, try and bring another employee on board to give the podcast a conversational feel. That way too, you can gather the opinions of others within your organization on various topics. This can also showcase to customers that your employees are educated on the different elements of your business.
Create Infographics
It’s never a bad idea to take a visual approach when creating content. Infographics present your audience with a clear visualization of the content that you’re providing. To do this, you’ll want to pick apart an old blog, breaking it down piece by piece into smaller sections. Then you can replace some of that text with pictures. Try to emphasize interesting stats, facts, quotes and side-by-side comparisons where you can.
Create an FAQ Page from Old Articles
Rather than creating a new FAQ article, look back at some of your older content and create an FAQ page based on that information. Is there a topic that you’re often asked about by your customers? Or perhaps certain components of your business’s products or services that are particularly confusing? Start there and create blurbs that answer those lingering questions. This may also help improve your ranking in voice search results, as voice queries entail longer queries and keywords (like questions).
Rather than constantly look to create new content, take a step back and look at some of your old content. You’ll be surprised how efficient and easy it can be to breathe new life into old content and how much it can benefit your business in the future.
