Why Optimisation Beats New Content Production
If you’re in the content game, it’s likely you’ve found yourself in a churn of producing new content month after month, week after week, day after day. Constantly reinventing your content plan, constantly trying to think up innovative new ideas to boost your authority, drive traffic and excite your readers. Well guess what? You really don’t need to bother.
Reignite your passion for the old stuff
OK – so you DO need to bother. Obviously, you’re doing a great job at churning out unique new content. Kudos to you. But have you ever thought about what happens to your content once it’s out there? Once it’s been crawled and indexed, secured a few ranking positions, and then disappeared down your priority list, while the new stuff saps all your attention?
Well, there’s a content life cycle you need to consider.
1. Brand new, live on the site
2. Low authority
3. Crawled & indexed by google
4. Starts to gain ranking positions
5. Starts to gain traffic
6. More traffic = more authority
7. More authority = higher rankings
8. Higher rankings = even more traffic
9. Winner, winner
10. Chicken dinner!
And so, the cycle continues… OR it could go a different way
1. Brand new, live on the site
2. Low authority
3. Crawled & indexed by google
4. Starts to gain ranking positions
5. Starts to gain traffic
6. Poor on-page behaviour
7. Diminished authority
8. Lower ranking positions
9. Lower traffic
10. Disappears into oblivion.
If this happens – and let’s face it, it very often does – resist the urge to completely dismiss this content. SEO is not an exact science after all. There’s a lot of tweaking, fiddling and fine-tuning. Try a little of this, a little of that. And if that doesn’t work – try a new approach. So, if your content is a flop, or it ranks well but then an algorithm changes (!!!) and it falls off a cliff, don’t just dismiss all that time spent. You agonised about that content after all. You worked hard on your keyword strategy, your ranking analysis and your SERPs approach. That’s still your content to work with, damn it! And frankly – a bit of low-hanging fruit never hurt anyone.
But, that’s old news now. Why bother?
Because it makes total sense, that’s why.
Sometimes, you might just need to tweak your keywords – maybe there’s a stronger theme to optimise for now, or there’s a new SERP placement for a different variant. Maybe you want to change the formatting, so your content is more suited to a Knowledge Panel. Or you’re revisiting the Schema mark-up, so all the right data can be pulled out for Answer cards.
Whatever the tweaking and fine-tuning – any historic content that’s been well thought-out in the first instance (which it has, obviously) is a QUICK WIN for new rankings.
Five reasons why you should reoptimize historic content
Ride off existing authority – pre-indexed content is hella valuable!
Increase ranking potential with wider keyword themes (high-search, niche nuggets)
Boost existing ranking positions – move a position 11 to a position 1
Repurpose and reformat for snippets – use bullets, lists, HTML graphs
Not using Schema? Slap your own wrists and get it implemented!
And it REALLY works!
We’ve been using re-optimisation as part of our SEO strategy for years now. It’s a win-win both for the client and for us. It means that everything we put out there into the Search Engine Void RETAINS and even REGENERATES its value. Nothing is underperforming – or at least, not for long.
We’re ALWAYS checking software for pages that have slipped from the top spots, and analysing why they’ve slipped, who’ve stolen those spots and how we can repurpose that content to secure even more traffic than we had before.
It’s a constant cycle, but it means our clients are always gaining new traffic and we’re never fumbling around in the dark for content ideas. Of course – you should always keep the new stuff churning out. But keep replenishing those hidden diamonds too. They might even end up your most high performing pages!
