Optimise content to avoid being a one trick pony

There’s a perception that a constant stream of new content is the secret to content marketing success. And while fresh, relevant content that will capture your audience’s attention is irreplaceable, you can also efficiently boost brand visibility by optimising your existing content. Here’s how to optimise content efficiently and effectively.

1. Find the content with the best potential

A simple way to find content that could be doing more for you is to look at your Google Analytics and/or Search Console to find pages that aren’t performing as well as they could. Some examples include:

• Pages that were performing better at the same time last year, and remain relevant
• Pages that are ranking in position 6-15 and getting few visits, or are ranking higher but are getting a low click-through rate
• Pages that have dropped in ranking over the last year (you can use some of the SEO tools we’ve previously highlighted to monitor this)

2. Update and optimise the content

What improvements can be made to warrant ‘republishing’ the piece of content? Can you update or add new information, or flesh out the comprehensiveness of the content? Is there a certain angle you can hone in on further? Are your page title and headings optimised? Are you using the best images you can? Ensuring content is up to date and ‘fresh’ are key signals to Google that your post is worth revisiting, and potentially, ranking higher.

Ensuring content is up to date and ‘fresh’ are key signals to Google that your post is worth revisiting, and potentially, ranking higher.

3. Review your keyword focus

Do you know what keywords your article is targeting? Have you undertaken keyword research to ensure they are the appropriate keywords with decent search volume? Use tools like Google Trends or Keywordtool.io to not only find your main target keywords, but also their relevant synonyms and related keywords.

4. Check your URL

URLs are an important part of the ranking algorithm and work best if they are kept simple and keyword-focused. There are two choices in the optimisation of existing content: maintain the same URL or update it. If the existing URL is relatively simple and similar to your target keywords; avoiding unnecessary redirects is a must. If, however, the URL has no relevancy to the target keywords; it may be worth optimising it and redirecting the old to the newly re-written URL. A site heavily loaded with redirects may suffer in search engine rankings however, so consider this carefully.

5. Add internal links back to the content

Links are the natural pathways for both users and Google to find your content. Help them by finding relevant articles on your site and adding links from them back to your newly updated content. A simple way to do this is to search related keywords and your site name in Google, or use a tool like Serprobot to find the highest ranking articles on your site to link back from.

6. Re-publish and promote

When you hit publish on all the updates you have made, don’t forget to also update the date to let Google know the content is fresh. If you have the option of both a ‘publish date’ (so the original day the content went live) and a ‘last updated’ date, even better. Don’t forget to share the content on your networks as you would with any new content – this can include social media, syndication and email marketing. We recommend curating multiple social posts off the back of each piece of content, honing in on multiple angles to extend the reach of the content.

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