If you’ve been following our long-time advice to integrate quality content into your website as part of your business’ search engine optimization (SEO strategy), it is likely that you have begun to amass quite a catalog. For some, this may mean years’ worth of content in your website full of targeted keywords meant to bring traffic to your site. As part of your overall SEO strategy, it may be time to start looking into re-optimizing some of that content.
Why Does Content Need to Be Re-Optimized?
All content, including evergreen content, can eventually grow stale and begin to lose some of its potency as a driver of your site. This happens for several reasons:
- Statistics change over time
- Content relevance can shift
- Post dates can start to look old
That last point is particularly key. If you have a post on a given topic that is dated two, five, or even ten years ago, it can turn your audience away – if even the content itself is still relevant and accurate. For this reason, it is especially important to revisit older content on your site and begin to look for ways to re-optimize it to freshen it up.
What Is Content Re-Optimization?
When you update existing content with new material, rather than creating completely new content, you are re-optimizing that content for the purpose of adding to its original value. Depending on your unique content and site, this may be done in several ways. Here are a few examples of what you could do to potentially re-optimize older content on your site:
- Updating outdated statistics with newer research, studies, or statistics
- Replacing examples featured in your content with more recent or more relevant examples
- Adding missing keywords or anchor text
- Adding links to more recent content or other newer content posts
- Adding additional multimedia, such as infographics or videos, to your content
- Adding modern SEO metadata, tags, or title tags to existing content
- Restructuring text to include other modern strategies, such as breaking up longer paragraphs, using more headers throughout the content, and placing main keywords at the beginning of the content.
There are many other potential ways to update and modernize older content to meet current SEO strategies, and these only represent a few. The main goal behind re-optimizing your content is to reinvigorate the work you’ve already done so that it continues to work for you and your business. Re-optimization represents the clearest way to ensure the long-term value of your content.
Three Ways to Re-Optimize Your Content as SEO Strategy
No matter what kind of content or topics your site includes, there are proven SEO strategies that have continued to evolve over the years and could breathe new life into your old content. Here are three things you can do to re-optimize your content:
- Update Target Keywords.
It is important to regularly review the keywords you use in order to ensure they are still relevant, match your current SEO goals, and line up with current data on audience search behavior. This may mean replacing outdated keywords, adding new keywords to fill in ranking gaps, or including other types of keywords, such as geo-targeted keywords. You may also discover in your old content that you have several competing pages that are vying for the same keyword traffic and decide to consolidate some of your keywords.
- Update Internal Links.
If you aren’t already, it is important to include internal links to other pages or blog posts on your site. These links can guide users to pages with more information on a given topic and improve engagement. This improves other metrics, as well, such as session duration, bounce rates, and conversion. Revisit anchor text within your old posts and look for places to link to relevant and more recent content.
- Update Formatting and Metadata
Google has changed its algorithms several times over the last few years, and with it specific formatting has grown more important to SEO strategies. For instance, your content should use proper header tag structure, which includes appropriate H1, H2, and H3 organization. Additionally, your posts should include titles, meta titles or title tags, descriptions, and other metadata aimed at helping Google and other search engines to see your content as a relevant answer to the user’s search query. By including these formatting strategies in your old content, you are ensuring that they will continue to be seen by the search engines – and therefore by your target audience.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it provides a helpful starting point for re-optimizing your old content. Once you’ve done these three steps, you could look into adding a few other strategies, such as upgrading your site’s mobile experience, optimizing your content for voice search, and adding more engaging multimedia to your content, such as videos.
For help breathing new life into your old or existing content and implementing re-optimization into your strategy, contact the team at Imagine Monkey today and ensure that your existing content continues working hard for you and your business.
