How to Reuse Old Content to Improve Your SEO

The World Wide Web is growing at an unbelievable rate and the amount of content on the internet is growing exponentially. Estimates from the website Internet Live Stats put the total number of websites on the internet at well over 1 billion, with over 4 million blog posts created every single day.

This poses a huge problem for website owners that seek to gain the attention of an increasingly impatient audience. It doesn’t matter how engaging and creative your content is, if you aren’t creating new material, you won’t be found on the internet and you won’t be able to grow your audience.

One of the best ways to reach new audiences is to repurpose old content. By giving old blog posts a facelift, you can recycle items from your archive while simultaneously generating a new audience.

Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle

Creating new content is always fun and exciting. But it often takes a large investment of time, and sometime even money. You may need to pay writers, pay for photographs or other media, or even pay for syndicated materials.

That’s why reusing content is an ideal way to beef up your output: you already have the assets you need, you simply have to give them a new face. The less you spend on producing new content, the higher ROI you will achieve from your site.

Repurposing content has a number of benefits that can help you get the most out of your archive. If you take advantage of your past work, you can easily create new blog posts or webpages for your website by slightly altering or improving the existing content.

That being said, the importance and power of good content cannot be understated. Remember that no matter what material you are reusing, the content has to remain engaging, interesting, and relevant to your audience. 

Simple Ways to Reuse Content

There are a number of simple and easy ways to make the most of your current archive. The most basic is to update and improve past articles. Find new information that has become relevant or connect the piece to some sort of recent or current event. New studies are showing that social media is outperforming Google, so you could even consider shortening the piece to make it more appropriate for Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media outlet.

One of the most powerful ways to repurpose content is by changing the format. Create a video from an article, an infographic for social media from a quote, or even a short podcast from a blog post. You already have the backbone and all the information you need so you can skip right to production.

The truth of the matter is that not every user connects with every type of media. Some prefer reading, while others prefer more interactive media such as video or audio. That’s why giving your old posts new life in a video/audio form can really have a great impact on helping you reach new audiences.

How to Repurpose Your Blog Content

The Long Life of Evergreen Content

Put simply, evergreen content is material that is always relevant and important to your audience. For example, articles about news, current trends, or recent statistics aren’t likely to be relevant in the future and don’t fall under the evergreen content label.

Don’t bother trying to reuse stale articles or trivial pieces of information because they aren’t very likely to gain a wide reach or increase your audience. Since evergreen content has such a long shelf life, it should be your go-to when looking for items to repurpose. Spend time finding content that is evergreen because it is likely to be the most impactful and successful repurposed content in your archive. 

If you are looking for evergreen content in your archive, focus on pieces that will likely stay important over the near, and distant, future. The content should be timeless, meaning it won’t expire or become irrelevant if the state of a certain topic, industry, business, etc. changes. 

Overall, reusing and recycling your old content is a great way to improve your SEO by increasing the quantity and quality of content you are generating. A few tips regarding the reuse of materials:

1. Be smart about which content you recycle. Make use of analytics and other metrics to get an understanding of where your audience is focusing its time, and repurpose that content.
2. Also, be sure NOT to duplicate content. Google will penalize your SEO if content is simply a duplicate, so be sure to invest the time and effort into making the new content stand out. Don’t just copy and paste; add some new value to the new post that your audience can’t find anywhere else. 

Most importantly, just continue to create and recreate. So many accomplishments in the internet world have come from pure luck: you never know when the right piece published at the right time will find extreme success.