Blogging is an important piece of a brand or organization’s integrated marketing strategy. While the purpose and corresponding key performance indicators (KPI’s) of a content strategy may vary, the ultimate goal is typically to increase brand or organizational awareness, to create a stronger connection with current and prospective audiences, and/or to drive conversions.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component to any blog that you want to be find-able via search engines (of course you do). A well-written blog that lacks consideration for SEO will have far less reach, and thus never live up to its full potential in reaching your content strategy goals.
While optimizing new blogs for SEO is important, you should also include updating existing blogs as part of your content strategy. Re-racking content is beneficial because you will spend less time updating a blog that has already been written than you would creating an entirely new blog, and the revised blog will still be able to drive improved SEO rankings.
Here are our tips for editing existing blogs that can then be re-used across marketing efforts.
Step 1: Identify blogs to update.
Start the process by identifying the blogs that have proven interesting to your readers. You can determine interest by looking into total blog pageviews in Google Analytics, or use in-platform analytics (such as Facebook Insights) to see which blogs you shared garnered the most click-throughs and the highest levels of engagement. A high-performing blog that is six months to a year old is a prime candidate for a refresh.
Step 2: Research SERP (search engine results page) competition for the keyword(s) targeted in the blog.
Scanning through the highest ranking competitive content, identify:
- Any themes or patterns that show up in multiple pieces of content
- Media (videos, pictures) used in the content
- Additional keywords that could be incorporated or leveraged throughout your post
Check out this article to see how you can track your SERPs at no cost.
Step 3: Update your existing blog.
Based on your findings, update relevant blogs to make them more comprehensive, thorough, and user-friendly.
- Update outdated or missing information
- Improve the intro
- Add sub-headers and/or additional sections
- Add additional photos or videos
- Add internal and external links
- Check for and fix all broken links
Step 4: Republish post as a new blog.
Republish your updated blog by changing the “published on” date. This will allow the blog to be featured as a brand new post that you can then promote on your social channels and in newsletters.
So, there you have it. A relatively quick and simple guide to updating old content to serve your integrated marketing and SEO strategies. That sounds like a win-win to us!
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