Old blog posts are like wine; they get better with age provided you know how to make them better. If you want to excel as a content marketer, it is essential you learn the art of making your older blogs refreshing. Without this, you cannot hold on to your target audience.
Why content maintenance cannot be undervalued
Creating content is relatively easy because you have complete creative freedom to build from scratch. You start researching something and then you keep adding to it, tweaking it from time to time. The content keeps getting posted on social media like blog posts. But, soon enough, the magic fades away and the blogs stop attracting as many viewers as they used to earlier. While content marketers realize the importance of maintaining quality content, they often shirk this responsibility. They would rather do away with the old content altogether to make way for fresh content.
So, how can you make sure your content stays evergreen? If you cannot retain the original appeal of the content, is it possible to lure new buyers to your site? The truth is, it would be a huge blunder to disregard the importance of old blog posts in brand awareness. You should try to update that content with more relevant and meaningful information so that its value keeps growing with time. Reports show that there are brands that have witnessed unprecedented traffic spikes when they began working on updating their original content.
Key benefits of producing evergreen content
- When you can successfully create content with long-term value supported by useful backlinks and relevant keywords, you can be certain that it will bring more traffic to your website. A post that offers helpful information to the readers acts like a backlink magnet.
- By updating a previous post you can also maintain content continuity. This is useful for boosting your search rankings with Google. So, the chances of attracting new readers and imbibing new customers are also escalated.
- When you put in the effort to maintain older blog posts, it helps to establish your authority on a specific subject. You do not have to worry constantly about backing the new content.
While these advantages of content maintenance are universally acknowledged, the overwhelming tasks of publishing and content creation seem to burden content marketers. And content maintenance is put on the back burner.
Tips and tricks to make sure your site content stays evergreen
If you cannot keep your content meaningful through the years you can be sure of losing out on readers and customers. Your job is to build a long-term sustainable relationship with your readers. To do this, you must have content that is relevant and reliable. So, when the old posts become outdated and redundant, your content loses appeal to the reader.
1. Fix Meta-Descriptions
One of the first things that you need to check for is if there are any technical issues that need to be solved when you update the old content. Regardless of how superior the site designing tools may have been when you built the site, these are likely to lose relevance with time. Technical problems may arise around these causing the site to slow down, or worse, crash. To prevent this from happening, you should check meta-titles as Google recently made some landmark changes to meta-descriptions. The earlier limit of 160 characters is defunct now; so, posts which were originally SEO-friendly may not be as optimized now. It is better to refresh these from time to time to ensure high SEO ranks. You can also try to introduce new title tags for increasing reader engagement with a specific post.
2. Fix Broken Links
You may find that many of your earlier blog posts have outdated or broken links. This can be very damaging to your reputation. Traffic to the site automatically diminishes because an outdated link tends to push your site rankings down. The simplest way to fix this problem is to use the Chrome extension Link Miner for auditing all outdated links. When the links are not healthy, they will be highlighted in red; else, they should be green.
3. Make Content Relevant
In case your original content had been created using obsolete tools, you can be sure it is not going to remain valid for users. It is very important to ensure that the content you offer in your blogs remains useful for current-day users. For instance, you may even use an “updated” tab for your blog posts which tells the reader that the information provided is current. The reader automatically understands that the blogs you offer are regularly updated and maintained. Seigemedia had witnessed an increase of almost 60% traffic when it started to include the “last updated” tag.
4. Update Popular Posts
While updating all your earlier posts is not practically feasible; it is also not desirable since many of them may not be useful at all in the present day. So, you can select a handful of popular posts and work on making these better. The idea is to identify why such a post had attracted viewers in the past. It could be the uniqueness of the design or the fact that it offered easier navigability. Whatever the driving factor, you need to nurture that further.
5. Refresh the Chosen Content
When you have evaluated these past popular posts, you can take any of the following two courses of action: you may either consider improving the quality of the content by offering even more in-depth information or borrow its theme and create more posts along those lines.
6. Revamp Outdated Posts
All posts, even if they had been highly popular and traffic-friendly in the past, may not hold good in the future. You must understand when a post loses its charm and relevance and learn to address this problem. If you do not wish to do away with these blogs, you should try to introduce fresh content to rejuvenate them. The new content needs to be eye-catchy and highly relevant so that viewers are forced to read it. To get this done properly, you must ask yourself whether the original content continues to attract your readers, whether it is actually giving your business a boost, and, finally, whether it is keeping up with the times. When you find that the answers to all these three questions are a confident “yes”, you should proceed to update the post and make it more relevant. In case you find that any of these answers is a “no”, you must not waste any more time revamping it. You can simply discard it and move on to something new. So, the trick to keeping viewers glued to your site is to understand the subtle difference between evergreen content and time-sensitive content.
7. Use Social Media
To keep the content useful for readers and to continue to drive more traffic to your site, you must promote your blogs on platforms like Twitter. When you become a Twitterati, your followers multiply in number as you keep retweeting interesting blog posts. Tweeting older posts will ensure that your new readers also come back to your site for more. For instance, you can start scheduling tweets of older posts, particularly those that have been retweeted many times over which shows heightened reader interest. Similarly, on Facebook, you may share earlier blog posts. One easy way to do this is by internal linking through anchor text. This helps to inform readers about older but relevant posts. When you use interlinking in all blog posts, you can ensure that readers who will go to the old posts will automatically be redirected to other posts from that link.
8. Use Webinars
You can consider hosting a webinar that draws millions of attendees. But for those who cannot be part of it, there should be an alternative. When you find that you have new visitors who are clueless about what they have missed, you can repurpose the webinar as a video on YouTube. By doing so, you can ensure that your content holds its appeal forever.
9. Test the Content
Whether you are looking for ways to drive more traffic to your site or get more subscribers, you should opt for testing. You can run tests on your site and then use the data thus collected to make a case study for your followers.
10. Use SlideShare
In case you had created an excellent PowerPoint presentation for a meeting that no longer holds value for your business, you can consider repurposing these into slide decks. You can embed the presentation on any of your pages to get fresh content for your readers. You can also include interviews to get more viewership for content. On the one hand, interviews are easy to conduct and edit. On the other, the interviewees are likely to share blogs and articles in which they have been mentioned.
So, it is actually possible to get more traffic with old content rather than by writing fresh content. Those who have been blogging for many years now, usually have a huge archive of old blog posts. This is virtually a gold mine of content because by simply revamping and reviving it, you can boost your viewership significantly. While enjoying success overnight may not be possible, you should not waste the opportunity to create evergreen content. You can decide to work harder and stay positive to come up with content that will hold relevance for many more years. And to do that, you can use the guidelines mentioned above to keep your content evergreen.
