insight : welton hong
Content Marketing Refresh: Dusting Off Old Content for New Performance in 2020
Don’t throw out content with the new year. Reshape it so it continues to serve you well going forward BY WELTON HONG
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n the new year, it’s tempting to adopt an approach that pushes out the old to make way for the new. While the first months of the year can be an ideal time to get ahead of spring-cleaning duties—from refreshing offices to clearing out and reorganizing filing cabinets—don’t make the mistake of tossing out things that are still valuable. That can include your past content marketing efforts. A quick sprucing up of content that performed well in the past can generate new leads this year without a lot of effort. And even content that fell flat before might be rescued and reused. It’s a tactic used by almost all the best digital marketers, and it’s something you can do in 2020 to reduce content marketing efforts while potentially improving search engine rankings, on-page traffic and conversions.
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JANUARY + FEBRUARY 2020 | wf-vision.com
Some businesses avoid this tactic because they’re worried about Google’s duplicate content penalties. But repurposed content isn’t duplicate content. The goal isn’t to find old content and copy and paste it into a new post. Instead, you’re reworking the content with updates or presenting it in a new manner. According to digital marketing expert Neil Patel, something like 30 percent of the web is repetitive content. That’s because brands take an idea or topic and create multiple pieces of content around it—including blog posts, white papers, social posts, slideshows, videos and infographics. And Google doesn’t care. In fact, this type of content clustering can actually be good for SEO if the content itself is high-quality. You can put a new spin on existing content in dozens of ways. Here are five common methods for repurposing old content for new traffic.
