If you have a Website, you most likely have content. It could be anything from what’s written on your Homepage, to your blogs (if, like us, you have them).
But as time goes on, your beautiful content will start to wither. There could be old references, links that don’t work, and even dates or stats that are no longer relevant to your audience.
This not only hurts your visitors to your Site, who won’t be impressed by the outdated content, it also affects your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts and can impact your Google ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The idea of deleting all of this defunct content could have your mind in a spin! And there definitely is the option there to just chuck it in the bin. But you don’t necessarily have to give up on all of that previous hard work. There is another way! You can repurpose your old content, which will boost your SEO and save you time later down the road. And we’re going to show you how.
Perform a Content Audit
The best place to start, dare we say, is probably the hardest of the whole process. It’s not fun, but it’s essential. It’s time to conduct an audit!
To understand your content, and figure out what needs updating, you’ll need to sift through all of it. This means reviewing every piece and analysing what is still working and what has elements that are no longer providing authority for your brand and Site.
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the idea of an audit, just take it slow and separate your content into categories to make it a bit easier to digest.
There’ll be some pieces that are no longer workable that you’ll have to delete, but the content that can be reworked should be kept for some repurposing!
Refresh and Republish Old Content
OK, after diving through all of your content, and having picked out the parts that are worth keeping, it’s time to do a refresh.
But please do ensure that the content you are refurbishing is QUALITY! Be fussy, make sure during your audit you’ve singled out the good stuff.
With this content in hand, go through and repurpose and republish! You cannot publish this content as is, Google doesn’t look kindly on that.
Some things you can do to uplift your content is to add new paragraphs and written excerpts, as well as adding new links and visuals within the content.
Are there any references to stats or data with specific dates? Double check they’re up to date, and if not, do some research to update and change any of the statistics you’ve got listed.
And that’s not the only area you’ll need to update in your content…
Update SEO Keywords and Links
If SEO is your game, then we’re sure you would have riddled your previous content with SEO keywords and links to gain Google’s favour. But as you know, Google is continuously updating and changing the way it crawls and analyses content.
With your chosen content, go through and pinpoint the keywords used and replace them with newly researched ones! Customer behaviour also changes, so do your research and find out what your audience is searching for these days.
Same goes for your links and backlinks! Some may be broken or linking to other content that is also rather old and outdated. Ensure these are fixed to match the updates you’re making within the content. Broken links greatly impact your SEO efforts and can affect your ranking in the SERPs.
If you follow our above recommendations when updating your content, you can be sure that it will make positive changes for your SEO! Don’t waste any time, get onto a content audit today and improve your ranking on Google!