If you've heard it once, you've heard it a million times: content is king. Does this mean that all you have to do is keep publishing blog articles until you build up enough of a cache to make your site a superpower?
Not exactly. Over time, your blogs get stale and they don't have the SEO capacity that they once did. That doesn't mean all your past work is going to waste, though.
Repurposing content is a way to use your previous blogs and revitalize them so they work harder for your SEO. In this guide, you'll find out all the essentials:
What Is Content Repurposing? Why Is Repurposing Content Beneficial to SEO? How to Decide Which Content to Repurpose 15 Tactics to Help You Repurpose Content 6 Examples of How SEMrush Reuses Its ContentThis article provides a good foundation of knowledge and strategies to repurpose your content like a pro.
What Is Content Repurposing?
Each time you write a blog post, you write it with a specific intent and audience in mind, but these can change over time.
This is when repurposing comes in handy. Repurposing content involves adding to or heavily revising your content to add more value.
That definition may sound vague, but that’s because recycling content comes in many forms. Your repurposing work can add value to a blog by reaching a new audience, adding new ways to reinforce and adjust your message to relate to the current climate.
Repurposing your content in this way allows you to reach people you missed the first time around.
All the while, repurposing saves time because you don't need to write a new blog from scratch.
Why Is Repurposing Content Beneficial to SEO?
Search engine optimization is a complex endeavor because search engines look at so many criteria when selecting a search's results. Fortunately for us all, recycling content helps your SEO in multiple ways.
First, it allows you to invest your resources wisely and reach wider audiences. Let’s say you had one blog post bringing you a good amount of traffic, and, based on it, you created an infographic and a video. That way, you have boosted your organic traffic with minimal investment of time and money.
Second, repurposing your content allows you to give the content a more recent update record.
Third, when you repurpose your old blogs, you have an opportunity to put your SEO knowledge to good use. Maybe certain keywords were surging when you wrote the blog but they aren't popular anymore. You can rework the blog to appeal to more up-to-date keyword data.
All these advantages team up to make your repurposing efforts well worth your time.
How to Decide Which Content to Recycle
You've decided that some of your content could be repurposed to better help your site, but where do you start? There are several steps you can take to develop your strategy for content repurposing.
Know Your Purpose
Always start with clear goals in mind. Why are you repurposing your content? Hint: it shouldn't be "because SEMrush said I should."
Repurposing is appropriate if your goals have changed. For example, if you wanted to bring in subscribers with your post, and now you want to bring qualified leads to sell your product, then it’s best to repurpose. If you want to keep your article focused on the same goal, revamping is a better choice.
Think of revamping as making minor tweaks and edits, while repurposing is more of an extensive change. Revamping might involve editing keywords, links, meta descriptions, headers, and so on. Repurposing could involve changing the entire intent of your content, transforming it into another type of content, and so on.
Know how to track those goals too. What statistics will you use to measure your results? What do you want the impact to be on your business?
Audit Your Existing Content
Start by finding content that best matches your current goals. Are you looking to reach a specific audience or sell more of a particular service? The best articles to repurpose are those which provide a gateway to those goals.
For instance, maybe you want to sell your online course. Start with content that addresses online personal development or the overall topic that the course covers.
If your article is performing poorly, revamping can turn it around, while repurposing helps you capitalize on an article that's already performing well.
Find Evergreen Content
Repurposing content is enough of a job on its own. You don't want to add the extra task of making a highly seasonable or outdated blog seem relevant. Instead, focus your effort on evergreen content that still makes sense and will continue to make sense for years to come.
Choose the evergreen pieces that you have more to say about. You can jumpstart this by using content ideation tools to get a list of popular subtopics, questions people ask, and related queries that you could use to develop your topic better.
Repurpose High-Performing Content
Take a look at your website's analytics. Find out which blogs rank best for metrics like their reach, organic visibility, linking structure, shares, and other performance statistics.
Review Your Recent Feedback
Spend some time scoping out the comments on your blogs. Look for constructive pieces of feedback, where readers suggest certain additions or mention shortcomings. If someone is taking the time to comment on your article, you should take them seriously.
Research Your Competitors
Move on to researching your competitors with an eye toward the skyscraper technique.
The skyscraper technique is a way to improve online content. You search the web and find the top-performing content for your topic. Check out what they've done and create a better, more comprehensive version.
You can then reach out to bloggers and sites who linked to those popular content pieces and share your new and improved version with them. If you're lucky, they may change the link to your content instead.
A big part of competitor research comes down to identifying keyword gaps: keywords for which you have few posts that rank well compared to your competitors.
With keyword gaps analysis, you will find plenty of keywords that your blog content hasn’t sufficiently covered. Once you go through the list and know which keywords you want to target, try to find the articles on your blog that are the most relevant to those keywords and repurpose them, finding a good angle and tailoring it to your website’s focus and audience.
Develop Your Content
With all that research in hand, decide what form you want your new content to take, keeping your original goal in mind -- whether you want to enter a new marketing channel, attract new audiences or improve your brand image.
Once you’ve decided on the form, choose a tactic that's best for you from one of the content repurposing tactics listed in the next chapter.
Finally, develop a detailed outline and turn it into high-quality content. The process will depend on the type of content you're producing, but the end product should be the same: a revitalized and repurposed version of the content that has already proven to be successful.
If you don't have the time or the skills to produce the repurposed content yourself, you don't have to. Once you're done with the strategic part and have decided on your goals, audience, and content to repurpose, you can outsource the actual writing with SEMrush Content Marketplace.
All you need to do is order a piece of content on the marketplace and include a link to the previous content you want to repurpose. Provide a detailed brief outlining your goals and whatever requirements you may have, and you'll have it repurposed within 2 weeks.
15 Tactics to Help You Repurpose Content
As with any digital marketing endeavor, repurposing your content requires well-thought-out tactics.
Below are some great options to go about repurposing content.
Your choice will depend on the amount of time and resources you have available, as well as the types of content you need. Ultimately, it comes down to finding the best fit for your capabilities and your company's needs.
Republish Your Existing Content
This is the most straightforward form of content repurposing. It means exactly what it sounds like: taking a successful blog post, redirecting it to a new audience or new goal, and republishing it on your site.
Content syndication is the practice of republishing your content on other sites. For instance, you can publish as a guest blogger on various external sites. Syndicating content works best for those looking for a quick and low-cost (usually no-cost) way to reach new audiences, increase backlinks, and get their ideas and brand in front of bigger audiences.
While there are many ways to republish your repurposed content, guest posting is one of the most helpful. It helps you build your catalog of backlinks while spreading your content and your name along with it.
Certain sites have made a name for themselves as popular user destinations, like Quora, Medium, and Product Hunt. You may consider repurposing some of your high-performing topics on these platforms as articles on your blog or guest posting spots.
Record Your Existing Content
Each webinar attracts an average of 148 attendees. If you continuously build a name for yourself as a webinar pro and attract more and more people, you could reach hundreds or thousands of people each time. You can do this more easily than you think by repurposing your existing blogs as webinars.
It's no secret that podcasts have surged in popularity in recent years. In fact, approximately 121 million Americans have listened to one in the past month. Turn your best articles into podcasts by recording them as audio. Here are some great tips on how to start a podcast to help you along.
As beneficial as images may be, videos are even better. 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%. This alone is a good reason to assign valuable resources to create videos based on the content that already exists.
Videos are also a great opportunity to try out new marketing channels (like YouTube, for example) and reach those of your audience members who prefer watching a minute-long-or-less video to reading a 1,000-word blog post.
More and more people are using online courses for personal and professional development. Consider repurposing your educational content and how-tos into an online course of your own, guided by an experienced industry expert. Issuing a free online certificate upon course completion is also a great way to keep your audience motivated.
Visualize Your Existing Content
Your articles don't have to stay in blog form. One way to repurpose them is to turn them into snippets like videos, pull quote graphics, and other quick bites that attract audiences.
Did you know that infographics get 12% more traffic, and 200% more shares than posts without images? You can capitalize on this by turning the valuable information from your blogs into attractive infographics for social media posts, website additions, email newsletters, and more.
Just like we did with this section of our Guide, turning the 15 tactics listed above into a handy infographic available for free download:
If you want to make use of a how-to article, look no further than an instructographic. Instructographics are like infographics and they have all the same benefits, but they focus on giving instructions rather than data. These are ideal for visual platforms like Pinterest.
PowerPoint presentations can be an excellent way to reach users who want quick, easy-to-digest information. Consider redeveloping your blogs into PowerPoints for conferences and SlideShare.
Group Your Existing Content
As you create marketing campaigns for your business, don't ignore your content. Repurpose your existing blogs into a directed, well-planned campaign on a particular topic or product you offer.
Email newsletters deliver interesting, valuable content directly to users' inboxes. Consider creating an email series from some of your well-aligned blogs, adding a few more instructions, examples, and links to navigate your readers through the content you’re sharing.
Think of ebooks as blogs, but taking a deeper dive into your topics. If you have many blogs on a particular topic, you can gather and rewrite them into a cohesive ebook.
Once you’ve decided on the form you want your new content to take and picked the right tactic, check out our article "8 Tools for Repurposing Content": these eight tools make repurposing significantly easier!
6 Examples of How SEMrush Reuses its Content
Repurposing content is a strategy that our SEMrush team has used well and used often. We can attest from first-hand experience that it works.
Example 1: The Ultimate Guide for Content Marketers
" The Ultimate Guide for Content Marketers" is a comprehensive PDF guide we created to tell new and developing content marketers everything they need to know. Seeing the PDF's success, we repurposed it into an online course. The course has become immensely popular, with 8,000+ registrations and a 10% completion rate.
Example 2: The State of Content Marketing
At the end of 2019, we published a report called " The State of Content Marketing Report 2019." This guide focused on current content marketing strategies and how marketers could put them to good use.
To repurpose this content, we broke the report into several blogs about specific components of the report. For instance, we blogged about “ Anatomy of Top Performing Articles”, “ Content Marketing Statistics”, and “ Top Content Marketing Trends.”
These three articles brought us additional 5.2K social shares and 4.3K backlinks.
Example 3: Social Media Checklist
Our SEMrush team noticed that our blog post " Your Ultimate Social Media Checklist" was getting noticed. To capitalize on the momentum, we developed an infographic based on the post.
We then published that infographic as a guest post on SocialMediaToday.com and MarketingProfs.com. Those infographics boosted our brand awareness as well as our brand expertise.
Example 4: Easter Egg Hunt
Gamification marketing is a thriving trend, and we took advantage of the trend by creating our Easter Egg Hunt game. After that campaign performed well, we repurposed it into a video (a virtual tour), which earned us an additional 2.5K views from our target audience. We went further and redeveloped the video into a blog post on gamification marketing, focusing on our Easter Egg Hunt game as an example.
Example 5: Thematic Campaigns Presentation
Thematic campaigns can be powerful ways to repurpose your content. For example, the SEMrush marketing teams have great experience in running holiday marketing campaigns using quizzes, games, and other fun activities aimed at product promotion and user entertainment. We collected these into a PowerPoint presentation and presented our expertise in thematic campaigns in a DMWF presentation. After that presentation's success, we also repurposed the content into a thriving case study.
Example 6: From Quora to Guest Post
Quora's question-and-answer format has provided a great way for SEMrush to share our expertise. We noticed one of our answers about the best social media strategies for hotel marketing was performing especially well.
To make the most of it, we repurposed the answer's content into a guest post on Influencer Marketing Hub, which brought us an additional 14K of estimated reach.
Repurposing Content to Your Advantage
Do you have a wealth of content on your site? Why use it only once when you can reap the rewards over and over? That's the benefit of repurposing content. The tips and guidelines above can help you make the most of each piece on your site time and time again.
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