How to Reuse Your Old Content Marketing to Gain More Traffic

You work so hard and exhaust so many resources to maintain the content activity on your website. Posting new content, checking and re-checking its accuracy, re-writing and making sure your SEO is the best it can be is just a small fraction of the work that has to be done to keep the content on any website up to date and interesting.

But it’s time to face the facts – your new content will very soon turn into old content which will find itself on the outskirts of your website and you’ll soon have forgotten about it.

How to Reuse Your Old Content Marketing to Gain More Traffic

We are Social Media (WeRSM), one of the biggest social media websites, checked and found that 76% of the visits to its blog were to old posts rather than new ones. This means that 3 out of 4 users who visit your site will read your old content, which you have already forgotten about, rather than the new content that you just uploaded.

The natural response to WeRSM’s discovery is to immediately start optimizing your old content to make sure its standards match the standards of your new content. Also, you can find many uses of your old content, check out how to do guest writing, edit them with new fresh info and share it with the world.

So here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t neglect your old content and keep investing in it.

1. Old content already exists in search engines

Anyone who knows a little bit about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), knows that it takes time for new content to make its way to the top of the search engines list.

Your new pages get exposure mostly by direct traffic, email marketing, and social network marketing so by the time they’ve had the necessary exposure and start popping up on search engines, they’re no longer new pages.

To back this up we go back to WeRSM’s analysis and find that indeed, out of the 76% of users who visited old content, almost all were directed to the content via search engines.

Use your own analysis tools to check where your own clients are being directed from and you’ll get similar results.

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2. Your old content may no longer be relevant and accurate

Internet marketers have a tendency to forget about any content that isn’t right in front of them, but just because the content doesn’t show up on the homepage – doesn’t mean that your users won’t be reading it. Keeping your old content up to date is crucial to avoid misleading your readers or having them acquire information that is no longer true or relevant.

SEO keywords also have a tendency to change quite a lot. checking their relevance is important to keep attracting new clients to your website.

3. Save your resources – editing is much easier than re-writing

Investing in new content is a task which will use up all your time and resources. In order to maximize your efficiency, tweak up old content rather than writing new content for your site.

Keep a list of all your old pages which are still relevant and producing traffic and use them as new content by adding up-to-date keywords and editing where necessary.

4. Don’t shoot yourself in the leg – repeating content is competing content

ActiveTrail’s blog contains countless articles and tips and sometimes we create an article about a subject that has already been written about, creating repeating content. More pages do mean more exposure on search engines but it also means that we’ll be competing against ourselves for clicks and exposure.

When you have repeating content on your website you have two pages which will get you a moderate number of users, but one good page that has less competition can jump to the top of the search and bring in a lot more new users.

So instead of writing a new article, take an old one and freshen it up, make sure it’s up to date and keep running with the old one, increasing its SEO rating as you go.

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5. Making sure your old content is up-to-date is the easiest way to get new leads

If most of the traffic on your website is generated by the old content then so do most of your leads. A “Lead” is a potential client and in order to turn a potential client into an actual one we have to direct him to some kind of action.

Make sure your action buttons are still relevant and active on all your old pages, otherwise you’re missing potential clients. Make sure all the links on the old pages are active and will bring your users to the pages you want them to see.

Keeping track of all the old content on the site is not an easy task, here are some tips how to stop neglecting your old content:

• Create a monthly editing and optimizing task.

• Create a list of your most successful pages – make sure these are always up to date.

• Whenever you want to add new content to your site, stop and check your old content first, maybe you don’t have to work so hard.

We have a tendency to forget what’s right under our nose, don’t forget your old content. Remember, words have meaning and your website is the sum of all its pages so keep your content up to date.

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