Republishing Content: Breathe New Life Into Your Copy

In short, republishing is the process of taking your existing content and giving it a new lease of life.

There are many benefits of recycling content through optimising, updating and improving aged content. Not only is republishing great when brainstorming new content ideas, but it also means that your most recent products and blogs are featured through the use of current internal links.

Republishing blog posts is all about taking existing content and

If it’s still relevant to your blog post content, stick to the same URL. You can update the URL slug and set up a redirect to your freshly optimised URL, however it’s important to remember that this does lessen the link value in the short term. So as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke… don’t fix it.

Whilst it’s advisable to keep the URL the same, your page’s title may benefit from a little refresh. Can you make your title even more relevant to what your users are actively searching for? Can you include your keyword or key search term in your title? If you can – and you haven’t already – your blog post title is the first place to start when you flex your fingers and republish.

We always favour quality over quantity, and that’s why republishing works so well with more established blogs. Blogs with a significant history should have already racked up a healthy number of blog posts to work with and improve.

Whilst building fresh, up-to-date content is important for SEO, older blog posts can be pushed further down into insignificance and quantity can sometimes overrule. However, recycled content enables you to use the foundations of a good blog post and make it even better, giving the content a new lease of life to bring quality back to the forefront.

Google’s search algorithm takes many factors into consideration when choosing the cream of the crop in relevant content and often prioritises freshness in the search results.

Cast your minds back to those Blue Peter days and the infamous saying “here’s something I prepared earlier“. Older content already has the foundations – or preparations – in place, and all that’s left to do are a few final amendments to have a finished product which is what we’ve all been waiting to see. As viewers, we weren’t interested in how we got there; we just wanted to see the latest article and how it looks in that present moment.

Republishing content follows a similar concept. We are rewarding readers with a fresh finished article and utilising the strong SEO value that older posts have accumulated over time. Recycled content keeps the existing SEO value while letting you keep the content current.

In short, the benefits of republishing are

You may be thinking that you can create a beautifully written, SEO-friendly blog post and rest easy knowing that once you’ve hit publish, all you have to do is wait for the steady stream of traffic to filter in and appreciate your performance-inducing penmanship. Wrong. Well, for the most part anyway.

Over time, content can become stale. Fast forward a couple of years and that ground-breaking content you thought would stand the test of time has become a little old-fashioned and users are just not that into it anymore.

Breathing new life into your recycled content is a must and here are the best ways to do it:

It seems an obvious point, but updating your content can mean several things. There may be parts of your blog post that are no longer relevant to the topic, and you can either remove the irrelevant content altogether to pave the way for some fresh words on the matter or tweak what’s already there to bring it bang up-to-date. If you’ve used facts or figures, it’s important you have used the latest statistics too. You should replace any older stats with more timely figures to keep your evidence current and valuable to the user.

Comb through your content and check that all your links are still going to relevant pages. If you’re refreshing your content, sometimes it’s good to give your external sources a rethink too. As time goes on, there may be more detailed, more relevant and more up-to-date sources to link to so make sure they feature in your content facelift.

Your content isn’t the only thing you need to focus on when republishing existing content; imagery can also benefit from a refresh. There may be more images available relating to your subject matter or better quality images to enhance your content. Make sure all your alt tags are relevant on your existing and new pictures and that your keywords feature if possible.

It’s always important to pay attention to your Meta title and description of your blog post too. Although your Meta information doesn’t directly affect the ranking of your content, it does have a big impact on the click-through rate from search results and getting the right traffic to your post. You don’t want to do all the hard work of republishing your post for your potential traffic to grind to a halt at the first hurdle. Ensure that your Meta description includes a relevant and accurate summary of the blog post, your keywords, some tempting text and a click-inducing call-to-action. It’s tricky squeezing all that into the 155 optimal character limit, but I believe in you.

Republishing content should always be included within your content marketing strategy. These five simple steps will help you identify which blog posts to republish, ensuring you have the tools to make your content more SEO friendly.

Age of blog post

When it comes to republishing blog posts, it’s important to firstly consider the age of the blog post and the original date published. The products and services internally linked within the blog would have been relevant at the time of publishing, although they may have since changed. For example, you could link to a product or service that you no longer sell, which will impact the users’ journey and lead to a higher bounce rate.

You want to prioritise checking that any internal and external links are updated to link to your current products and services, contact information and recent blog posts.

Although it won’t always be the case that the oldest blogs need republishing, it’s a good place to start. Blogs that are six months old or more could do with refreshing to be more relevant and reflect accurate statistics or changes in the way of the world. For instance, could the COVID-19 pandemic be mentioned in a previous blog post to make it current and of more of interest for your audience?

Consider the time of year and season

When looking at your existing blogs to republish, consider the present date and any upcoming seasons or holidays.

You may be able to republish a blog around an upcoming season, such as “The top fashion trends for January 2021”. Or, if you’re looking to republish a blog in November, then consider how the season is changing from Autumn to Winter. Reflect on how a change in season may impact your buyer personas and their need for your product. Be conscious of leaving yourself enough time to draft, review and republish your blog in time for that particular date for the best traffic opportunity.

Additionally, think of the widely known and niche national and international days of the year. Updating content to coincide with upcoming, celebrated dates can directly attract your target audience more or extend the reach of your post, both of which can increase your post’s ranking.

For instance, International Women’s Day, World Alzheimer’s Month and World Book Day, are a selection of notable days that you could feature, depending on what fits with your business and brand. Also, consider more widely celebrated days, like Valentines Day, Halloween, Diwali and Christmas.

Keyword trends

When thinking about which blog posts to republish, keep in mind any present trends. These trends could be popular in the news, often talked about through word of mouth or actively posted about social media. Also, pay attention to your industry trends, such as an update in software, like the 2020 Apple iOS14 update.

Once you’ve established these trends, you’ll recognise that related phrases will start to appear as keyword trends as more people research to find out more on the topic. You’ll want to take advantage of this and consider if you could incorporate any of these trends and trending keywords in an old blog post to make the content more accurate and current.

A great tool that we use to discover exact and related keywords is Google Keyword Planner. This tool is also great when planning new blog posts as it clearly shows the range of average monthly searches. This means you can tailor the keywords you include to be the most appropriate for your target audience. For SEO purposes, it’s important to keep the existing keywords already in the post and look out for where you could weave in new keywords to boost the SERPs.

Consider the SEO

When looking to spot a republishing opportunity, you may find that you have some evergreen content. Here, the blogs actual content may not need refreshing, but it’s important to consider the SEO value.

You want your blog posts to be SEO friendly. You have a small character limit to engage the reader as the meta title should be no more than 60 characters, whereas the meta description should be no more than 155 characters.

Even if a blog is ranking and performing well, it’s important to consider updating the excerpt, slug, meta title, meta description and meta keywords to drive the most effective traffic to your website.

Use SEO software

If you aren’t already using SEO software to measure your pages’ ranking for keywords, then we’d highly recommend Moz and Searchmetrics (now part of Conductor). Both of these are useful tools which visualise how well your blog posts are ranking for certain tracked keywords on Google.

Both Moz and Searchmetrics are great tools to utilise to identify opportunities for republishing blog posts. A republished blog doesn’t have to be one that’s dropped considerably to page five or six in the SERPs. A republishing opportunity can also be a blog that’s increased in rankings to appear higher on the SERP.

More importantly, you want to aim for your blog to appear as the featured snippet. Therefore, if your blog is rising in ranks, what else could you include to get to that featured spot? Think about using effective keywords and updating images and their alt text, headings, subheadings and internal and external links.

Republishing blog posts is not only a vital step for improving the SEO of your blog post, but it also gives you the opportunity for repurposing content.

Repurposing blog content is an effective way to spread your message to more than one audience. For example, you’ve republished a blog post to be the most up to date it can be, with a recent publishing date. Now, it’s your opportunity to spread that message on different platforms. Think about which key messages from that republished blog will be engaged with the most on different platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

We hope you’ve found this quick guide to republishing content and the benefits republishing can bring of interest. For more information and advice on what we can do to get your content noticed by the people that matter, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help your content marketing campaigns. Alternatively, request a content audit from us, and we can show you the benefits of a fresh content strategy for your business.