Content creation is essential for any website that wants to attract visitors. Carefully crafted content can boost your site’s visibility and positively impact your SEO. Unfortunately, creating quality content is a significant time investment. However, there are a few ways to get some more juice out of your old articles and use them to promote your website. We are going to show you four ways how to repurpose old content to improve your SEO.

A word of warning

Before we dive into how your old content can bring new life to your website, we believe that we should warn you against making a few rookie mistakes. First of all, the main goal of the tips we will be presenting here is to improve your SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques that can help your website rank. The importance of a high position in search engines cannot be understated. Users rarely venture outside of the first page of search engine results. Therefore, you should make it a top priority to get on page one for your chosen keywords.

Just as specific techniques can help your site rank better by boosting your SEO, some techniques will give you a penalty or get your site entirely blacklisted. These are often called black hat SEO techniques, and we suggest avoiding them. You should partner with experienced web developers who will only employ white hat techniques and design principles when building your site.

With that being said, we will leave you with an important warning: Never copy or duplicate your content! This is considered a black hat SEO technique, and it will get your site in trouble with Google. We will show you how to repurpose old content to improve your SEO legitimately in the following tips. Content duplication is never a good solution, and we strongly advise against doing anything that will jeopardize your site’s ranking.

Woman optimizing WordPress blog article for SEO.
Go through old content and make sure it’s optimized for current SEO standards.

4 ways how to repurpose old content to improve your SEO

Below are the best ways to repurpose your old content so you can improve your SEO.

  1. Optimize your old content

We already mentioned that SEO relies on multiple design principles to get more visitors to your site. It’s generally recommended to review how your SEO performs occasionally. Search engines can sometimes implement changes to their guidelines or even enforce new policies which favor specific SEO techniques. Besides optimizing your website, you can go through your old content and see if it’s SEO friendly. Content optimization includes the following:

  • Proper structure. Include headings, subheadings, and paragraphs that aren’t longer than 300 words. 
  • Meta descriptions, title and alt tags. Add captions and tags to all of your content to improve your SEO.

Use appropriate URLs. Include relevant keywords in the URL of your content pages.

Papers with new information to help repurpose old content.
Expand your old content and add new information.
  1. Update your content with new information

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. When you need information, would you look up a 5-year-old article and trust what it has to say? This doesn’t necessarily mean that old articles are wrong, but users generally feel more comfortable reading something from the current year. Besides, the world has been moving quickly lately, and online information tends to get outdated before you know it. 

However, if you believe that your old content can still provide value to modern audiences, we recommend updating it with current information. Search engines naturally prefer long-form articles. You can add a few paragraphs to your old content. That can serve as an excellent refresher by making it relevant to new audiences while also increasing its length at the same time.

  1. Link your old content with modern articles

When users arrive at your site searching for information, you should make finding relevant articles easy by implementing an internal linking structure. An essential part of digital marketing is making users aware of what you offer. You can revisit your old content and insert links to new articles so that readers can follow up on what else you have written in the meantime. The same strategy works in the reverse order as well. If you have already written about a specific topic, include links to your old content so you don’t have to waste time and energy covering the same basic concepts in every article you post. Additionally, a clear internal link structure makes your website easier to crawl. Search engines will index your pages faster, which will positively affect your overall rank.

Infographic showing eCommerce statistics to improve SEO.
Turn your old content into modern, catchy infographics.
  1. Experiment with new post types

Regardless of what most people think, blogs can actually be used to host various post types. If you want to explore new avenues in your blog, you can experiment by reworking your old content. Whenever you attempt something new, there is a risk that it won’t catch on with your audience. For this reason, your old content represents the perfect vehicle to experiment with. 

Imagine putting a significant amount of time into developing a new content format, only for it to receive little to no audience traction. It’s much safer to repurpose your old content and test the waters. Here are several new content formats which are both SEO friendly and will also spark interest from your audience:

  • Infographics. You can rework your old articles into informative images. Infographics are popular, so this is a great way to get your content shared across the web by other people.
  • Videos. Modern audiences would rather watch a video than read a lengthy article. Use old articles as a script for your videos.
  • Podcast. You can discuss previously covered topics in a podcast on your site.

In conclusion

Get more use out of your previously published content and use it to promote your website. We have given you four ideas on how to repurpose old content to improve your SEO. Now it’s up to you to go through your old posts and give them a touch-up. Reworking your old content can save you tremendous amounts of time and resources that can be better used elsewhere.