OLD is GOLD: How Old Contents Can Help Your New Marketing Strategy

Content marketing was a do-it-yourself thing for many bloggers and website owners’ way back in history. Everyone believed it is the most effective way to grab the eyeballs and create a great authority for their brand. Folks used to farm the online industry with tons of content written and posted on a daily basis.

Gone are the days when people used to post multiple contents on the same topic and link within each other. With all the advancements made by Google in the search section, bloggers and website owners’ are now so alert before posting anything on their website. This revolution in the search industry has forced everyone to emphasize on quality rather than quantity. But it is also an undeniable fact that though people used to farm the content marketing strategy they also had some really valuable insights to share within their contents. For example, the below blog has some really great information that is hidden deep inside their website.

Image Source: Edmunds.com

Don’t you think it would be a brilliant idea to include these valuable pieces of content within your new marketing strategy and take it to the next level? Let’s discuss further how these contents can help you out.

Why The Old Content Matters A Lot?

The blogs or websites that are active since ages will obviously have numerous content posted and all these make a huge cluster of informative, non-informative, evergreen, technical and non-technical contents. It is really vital at first instance to clear this cluster and allow these evergreen, technical and informative content to pop out and serve your audiences again.

The core objective of publishing content is to provide a huge support for your brand identity. Readers always remember the website that served them with valuable information they were looking for at that instance and tend to re-visit the website in future. Thus it is the responsibility of the blogger or website owner to feed them with valuable ones again and serve their purpose, else this may spoil their brand identity and ultimately they will lose their returning visitors.

How Does Google examine your old content?

Being a website or blog owner, it is your responsibility to make the job easy for the Google bots. Imagine how hard it will be for the bots to crawl all these URLs the old posts are generating. So erasing out worthless contents will ultimately help bots to crawl your website much effectively. Google loves websites that have only valuable information to share with its audiences. So serving Google is the secondary objective of optimizing the old contents within your website.

Let’s have a step by step approach on how to execute this clean-up process:

Step – 1:

The first step is to collect all the blog contents that you have posted in all these years. This depends on the CMS you are using, if you are working on WordPress CMS then the process is effortless. Once you have the list of blogs, drill down into your Google Analytics account and inspect the number of sessions contributed by each blog.

Follow me to make this process even easier. Prepare an excel sheet and list out all the blog URLs and make specific columns as listed below:

Column 1: Blog URL

Columns 2: Posted on (DD/MM/YYY)

Column 3: GA Sessions (3 to 6 months after the date of publishing)

Column 4: Category of the blog

1. Informative
2. Evergreen
3. Technical
4. Non-Technical
5. Promotional

This is what your excel sheet will look like:

Step – 2:

Fill out this excel sheet and gather all the necessary data. The core reason to analyze the Google Analytics (GA) sessions is to find out the top performing blogs that acquired maximum traffic and gathered more attention. This will make your job easy as there is no point in analyzing the blogs that didn’t perform well in retrospect.

Step – 3:

This will give you a list of old blogs that had successfully generated quality traffic for your blog and were also popular among your readers. The next step is to find out the blogs that can be used in your new marketing strategy. The bifurcation is really simple now. Have a look beneath:

Good Quality Blogs:

• Informative
• Evergreen
• Technical

Bad Quality Blogs:

• Non-Technical
• Promotional

Step – 4:

Implement a permanent 301 redirection on the bad quality blogs and redirect them to latest and relevant blogs. The good quality blogs are now ready to be used again.

How To Make The Ideal Use of Good Quality Old Blogs?

Executing the above mentioned 4 steps will provide you a list of good quality blogs that you can analyze further and make it suitable for your new marketing strategy by adding latest content, increasing the length of the blog, implement internal linking.

Adding Latest Content:

There may be certain aspects of specifically the Informative blogs that need content modification, for instance, if you had mentioned any statistics that are subjected to change based on the current scenario then consider changing the content accordingly. Also, consider updating the images if used within the content.

Increasing the Length of the Blog:

This will largely depend on the long tail keywords that you are targeting in your new marketing campaign. If you have managed to search and find new keywords then definitely add more contents surrounding the keywords which will give it a boost in ranking.

Implementing Internal Linking:

Consider drafting your new content by creating relevant scope where you can interlink with old blogs. This will allow you to provide more valuable content to your audiences and ultimately will help you to gather more brand authority.

To conclude, keep an eye on the performance of each blog and try to recycle them at definite intervals. Old blogs always have higher authority in terms of link juice as well as the trust it has over your audiences. Thus it is undoubtedly a brilliant idea to go back in history and make the right use of old blogs.