During the 7 years I’ve been working in SEO, I’ve read countless articles about content and its impact on rankings. But over this time, what has happened to all the content the came before that? And the content that came prior to that?
Well, Digital Strategist Erin Everhart has written an interesting post on ‘How To Manage Your Old & Outdated Content’ that tackles some interesting points on making use of old posts and bringing them up to standard to appease the latest updates in digital marketing.
Broken down into the following headings:
- Is Your Site As Panda-Proof As You Think?
- Don’t Delete It – Optimize It
- Ok, Sometimes It Needs To Be Deleted
Everhart discusses this in detail and although the majority of them are valid points, there is one area I wanted to delve into further.
In the second point, Everhart makes the following statement;
‘New content is necessary, but it takes far more time to create something new than it does to update and optimize something old.’
This caused a little debate in the Creare Content Marketing team as I feel this often isn’t the case and actually editing old content can be more difficult than starting a piece from scratch.
That said, finding the initial idea can be half the battle and when editing work, you’re already underway. In the end we agreed to disagree, but my advice is don’t get in the trap of spending hours trying to make a mediocre piece slightly less mediocre.
There are two main things that I am in complete agreement with which I think many content marketers forget – on-going promotion and updating keyword research.
Regarding publication, I understand the need to have the right balance of new and repurposed content, but what astounds me is the effort (or not) that is put into promoting content months after it’s gone live. Good content is timeless and therefore can be valuable to readers for months afterwards.
In terms of keyword research, there are many opportunities that are forgotten when we initially write a piece of content. By repurposing you have a second chance to make more of keywords and focus on the search-ability of the piece.
So, in conclusion, Erin Everhart offers some excellent advice on how to make the most of historic data. It’s all about knowing when to delete, repurpose or create content to maximise exposure and show off your skills.