How to reuse your old content to gain more traffic. Do not ignore your old content marketing.
We know it, you work hard and surely wasted many resources to maintain a permanent activity and a constant presence on your Internet site.
Displaying new content, checking the accuracy, possible correction or rewriting, SEO optimization is an integral part of daily work. All this by ensuring that your SEO is the most work possible even if it is a small fraction of the work that should be done to keep your website content up to date and interesting.
A Study done by We are Social Media (WeRSM), one of the largest sites dealing with social networks, found that 76% of visits to his blog related to the reading of old articles posted sometimes several months ago. This means that 3 out of 4 Internet users visit a site to read the content of old articles and not to read new articles recently posted.
This study explains that it is also very important to optimize your old content to ensure that it is in sync with current news. Then edit it, add relevant information and recent facts and do not wait to share it.
It’s time to face hard facts. Your brand new content will soon turn into old and will end up on the periphery of your website and in your memory.
So here are 5 reasons why you should not neglect your old content and continue to invest in it:
1. Your old content is already present in the search engines
Anyone with even basic knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) knows that it takes time for the new content to make its way to the top of your search engine rankings.
Your new content mainly draws its exposure from direct traffic, email marketing, and relay via social networks. To be effective, it takes a while. After this time, it may be that your content is already irrelevant.
To support this theory, let’s go back to the analysis made by WeRSM and note that, indeed, of the 76% of Internet users who visited the old article, almost all were directed to the content via the search engines.
It is, therefore, crucial to use your own analysis tools to check where and how your clients are redirected.
2. Your used content may no longer be relevant and accurate
Marketers tend to forget that all content needs to be checked on a regular basis. They tend to consider only content that directly jumps out at them. Just because the content does not appear on the home page does not mean that your users will not find it at one time or another. Remember to keep your old articles up to date; it’s even essential to avoid misleading your readers or letting them acquire inaccurate or outdated information.
Updating keywords for your SEO is also an element to take into account and that can change a lot of things. Frequently check their relevance is important to continue to attract new customers to your website.
3. Save your resources – editing is much easier than rewriting
Investing in new content is a task that will use all your time and resources. In order to maximize your efficiency, it is strongly recommended to ‘refresh’ your old content as much as possible rather than writing new text for your site.
Keep a list of all your old, up-to-date pages that are always relevant and use them to create your new content by adding new keywords and of course, by editing them if necessary.
4. Do not shoot yourself in the foot – repeated content is competitive content
ActiveTrail’s blog contains countless articles and advice in the field of marketing. Sometimes we create an article about a topic we’ve already written on, which creates a kind of duplicate content. Be careful, more pages do not mean more exposure on search engines, but it does mean that you will be competing against yourself for clicks and exposure.
Indeed, if you write an article dealing with a subject already studied, you will have two different web pages (for a single subject treated). This will allow you to get a moderate number of users. On the other hand, a single good article, with less competition, could significantly improve the visibility of your pages on the web and thus attract new users.
In this case, instead of writing a new article, take the old article and refresh it, make sure it is up to date. Your web referencing rate could only improve and you would find yourself, little by little, at the top of the poster!
5. Making sure your content is up-to-date is the best way to get new leads
If we assume that most of your website traffic is generated by your old content, then it’s the same for most of your prospects. A Lead is a potential customer and in order to turn that prospect into a real customer, we need to direct him to some sort of action.
Make sure your call to action is still relevant and active on all your old pages, at the risk of losing potential customers. Make sure that all the links on the old pages are active and bring your users to the pages you want them to come to.
Keeping track of all the contents of your site is not an easy task. Here are some tips to avoid neglecting your old content:
Set up a monthly task of modifying and optimizing your old content;
Create a list of your most successful pages – make sure they are always up to date;
Whenever you want to add new content to your site, stop for a moment and check your old content first. It is possible that you do not have to work so hard.
We tend to forget what’s right in front of us, so, even more, when it’s gone. From now on, it’s up to you to remember your old content. Remember, words make sense and your website is the sum of all its pages. Remember to keep your content always up to date.