How Can Old Content Improve Organic SEO?

The Internet has a high volume of content. It continues to expand at high rates. For that reason, it becomes harder and harder to entice an audience. Organic SEO can help, but it is becoming harder to attain.

Content is King

You may have heard of it again and again. However, some people are asking about the ROI on publishing pages that can be useful for a few days or weeks. You may ask why do you need to keep feeding your readers fresh content if you’re not going to obtain anything in return?

For SEO experts, there’s no reason to create new content. Old content may help in improving your site’s organic SEO. In other words, you can make your old content an asset. To do so, you need to update it regularly and upgrade content that is performing laggardly. Then, promote and repurpose it.

Doing so will extend its shelf life, thereby, maximizing its discoverability.

How to get started?

You can start by auditing your site’s content. Determine which pages require updating, upgrading or repurposing.

Since content marketing is about quality, you may take down those pages that relate to your old products or services. But don’t just take them down and delete them. Make sure that you have set up 301 redirects. In this way, when people visit the old URLs, they are redirected to updated pages.

Then, review your page performance metrics. Find out what articles should have performed well but they never lived up to their potential. These pages require your attention. Update these posts to reflect the latest information.

It is also vital that you research long-tail keywords and use them naturally within your content.

To make your site’s pages more inviting, you may add visuals and sub-headers. If you are making arguments, include some statistics to back them up. Then, make sure to include links to experts who write about the same topic as yours.

Google’s algorithm ranks domains that offer an ongoing flow of fresh content. However, it also favors pages that are published recently. When updating your content, avoid sacrificing the seniority benefits. That is, the new version should have the same URL as the old one.

On-site engagement signals can help your site’s ranking holistically. When people keep on clicking your content archives, it can plummet your site’s bounce rate. It is also useful to promote your content off-site by sharing it to your social media channels. Bear in mind that organic social shares can indirectly help organic SEO.