An SEO agency perspective on repurposing content

Content marketing.

It’s used to attract, engage, and retain an audience.

It establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.

And of course, Google loves it! And as an SEO agency, we think that’s key.

But does that mean you should be consistently slogging through a constant production line of content?

Not if you’re smart.

Because although it is true that content goes stale and loses SEO capacity over time, there is a simple solution.

Repurposing.

It’s a way to use your previous content and revitalise it so that it works harder for your SEO.

In this article, we’ll discuss the details on why repurposing is the smart thing to do, the content you should repurpose, and how to do so.

SAVES TIME AND RESOURCE

Repurposing content is a super quick way to keep your brand always on without constantly churning out brand new material, which takes time. Rather than thinking up new topics, researching them, writing, and publishing, you can pull fresh content out of existing content.

GIVES A LEASE OF LIFE TO OLD, HIGH-PERFORMING CONTENT

Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106% (HubSpot).

REACHES NEW AUDIENCES

Every human is created differently. Which means they also consume content differently! Your customers won’t all be on the same platforms and choosing to consume content in the same way. Some will prefer reading, others will prefer more visual media. So repurposing content can generate new clicks and leads.

SIGNALS CONTENT FRESHNESS TO SEARCH ENGINES

Google’s Caffeine indexing system (launched in 2010) was designed to help the search engine present the most recent and relevant search results. It looks at a number of factors to measure content freshness, like page inception date, amount of change, and rate of page change. So keeping your content up to date increases the likelihood of your content ranking higher on SERPs.

PROVIDES FRESH BACKLINKS

Which spreads link equity. On average, number one Google SERP results have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them. And when you create several pieces of content about the same topic, you have more opportunities to target a specific keyword in long-tail form.

Don’t just use a scattergun repurposing strategy. Audit your content to identify which ones you should repurpose.

Look at the top ten organic landing pages for your domain and run a few checks on the content:

• Are those pages ranking for keywords you are currently targeting?
• Do those pages align with your current positioning?

Then, look at how those pieces of content can be improved. For example, if the page is performing well on traffic but less so on engagement, it may need a refresh.

Select evergreen content that will stay relevant and provide value to your audience for months or years to come.

WHEREVER THE ORIGINAL CONTENT WAS

As mentioned above, it’s important to keep your high-performing content fresh because Google’s Caffeine indexing system favours this.

Look for opportunities to update it with new information, facts, statistics, or research, or add links to new content that you’ve published since.

You can also embed new media. So if you are repurposing to Instagram for example (see below), make sure you go back into the original content and add the visuals back in.

Finally, make sure you update keywords, titles, and meta descriptions to appeal to more up-to-date keyword data.

YOUR OTHER OWNED CHANNELS

Don’t forget about your other owned channels. Your content can be repurposed across:

• Socials
• Emails
• Podcasts

This expands the reach of your content to a wider audience.

Just be sure to:

• Optimise the content for the channel and the audience who hang out there. We’ll talk more about repurposing to different formats below.
• Give the original content a chance to get indexed by search engines before you republish it.

EXTERNAL SITES

Republish your content as a guest blogger on external sites like Medium to get your content seen by wider audiences. Be sure to link back to the original content to increase backlinks. You can also reach out to other content creators to see if they’d like to share or link to your content.

SHORT-FORM CONTENT

Chop up long-form content into bite size pieces. Pull out key stats, quotes, or quick tips and use them as social media posts. Create carousels on Instagram, or threads on Twitter.

VISUAL CONTENT

As mentioned above, different people favour different types of content. So take your written blog post and turn it into an infographic, or a well-designed graphic.

If you do create visuals, be sure to go back and add the images into your original blog post. Written content combined with visual elements perform better for organic SEO because it makes content more shareable.

RECORDED CONTENT

Another way to mix up the format is to record the content as a video or podcast.

According to BrainRules, when we hear information that is not paired with a relevant image, we will only remember 10% of it three days later. Adding an image increases the chances of people remembering what they’ve read to 65%.

And remember our first formatting tip? Chop the video or podcast up into bitesize snippets. Attention spans are short these days so short form videos are key (85% of marketers saying short form videos are the most effective format on social media).

GROUPED CONTENT

If you have a bundle of content that fits under the same umbrella, why not package it up?

Create an email series or email round up and share it with your database.

Or turn it into a piece of gated content – an ebook sharing your expertise.

REPURPOSE THE OTHER WAY, TOO

It’s not just blogs you can repurpose. You can reverse it, too. Transcribe your audio or video content and turn it into a blog post. Or repurpose well-performing social content.

Final SEO agency tips:

• Create a cluster of content that targets and ranks for a broader pool of related keywords by including longer-tail variations of your core keywords in your repurposed content.
• Make sure you adapt the content to fit the channel and the audience you find there.
• Always provide backlinks to the original content.
• Ensure you keep your original content up-to-date with the latest information and relevant keywords.

The key to a successful SEO strategy is good content. We are an SEO agency that gives our clients the support they need to create content that compels. If you’d like to discuss your SEO and content strategy, get in touch.