Whether you have lots of experience with content marketing or are just starting to dabble, you probably know that blogging is one of the best ways to increase organic traffic on your website. Publishing new posts daily, weekly, or bi-monthly feels good and is good for business, but even the most creative souls are at a loss for words every now and then. What’s even likelier is that you get too busy to continue creating fresh content as often as you’d like.

If this is an issue you’ve encountered, one surefire solution is to refresh your existing blogs. This is an efficient solution for maintaining consistent web traffic, requiring a small investment of time for a large reward.

Here are some benefits you’ll derive from a blog content revamp:

Fresh content = Good for SEO

Our SEO agency serving Monroe, WA knows as well as anyone how much Google loves new content. Google won’t care if you’re repurposing an old blog, so long as the information, data, and insights you add are relevant and timely for today’s reading audience. Taking the time to refresh your blog content not only translates into new website visitors, but also a better search engine ranking.

An item of particular importance are your keywords. Now that some time has passed and your content has matured, you might find that your blog acquires some renewed freshness just by infusing new keywords. Before updating your keywords, you’ll want to get a sense of a) how the current post is performing, and b) which new keywords could be ideal in terms of attracting new visitors. SEMrush is an excellent resource to use here. Just paste your blog’s URL and SEMrush will show you how it’s performing in terms of organic keyword searches.

Build on Past Success

Since you’ve already taken the time to build a collection of interesting, effective blog posts, why spend time creating an entirely new batch? Instead, polish what you have. The biggest benefit here, as we alluded to above, is that a little bit of polish saves a lot of time. And as covered in the preceding section, when your tweaks introduce relevant information, a timely perspective, or a new viewpoint, you can expect to see a growth in website visitors and SEO ranking.

One area you might want to focus your polishing efforts on is blog length. 1,890 words is the average length of blog posts garnering first page results on Google. Interestingly, blog post length has rapidly increased over the last few years. From 2014 – 2015 it increased 9 percent, and then from 2015 – 2016 it increased by 19 percent, more than 2x the previous year.

Refresh or Set Up a Redirect

At some point your posts, no matter how special they were when first written, will age and decline in usefulness with the passage of time. If a certain blog post needs only a few tweaks in order to feature several times in a year and still be effective, that’s the most you can ask for. And when it finally becomes clear that the blog’s effectiveness is lost without a complete rewrite, you can set up a redirect to a more relevant post.

Adapt to a New Format

Some readers like short blogs. Some readers like long ones. Certain people enjoy blogs with lots of graphics, while others appreciate blogs rich with words. In order to mine new website visitors who prefer one content format or another, try “shapeshifting” your existing blogs to address different tastes. Depending on how you decide to reformat a given blog, this option may take a little bit longer than the other three options covered here, but you should be pleased with the payoff. Adding in more graphics, illustrations, or photos will also make the blog post more shareable on social networks like Facebook, twitter, and pinterest.

Resharing content is a great way to get the absolute most out of an existing blog. It puts your post in front of people who’ve never seen it before, and it can also boost engagement on social media sites – thereby putting you in touch with even more new prospects. And even better, the combination of these two benefits is also quite profitable in terms of SEO.

For more insights into all things digital marketing near Everett, WA, contact the forward-thinking team at Inquisitek.