Repurposing Content for SEO

Description

At your wit’s end trying to think of new content ideas for your content strategy? Cami and Bec talk about how just ONE piece of content can turn into a few months of strategy.

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Audio Transcript

Cami: Hi, Bec. Nice to hear from you.

Bec: Yes, you too. Thank you for making time to pop on to the show. So, I guess my first question would be, why would we repurpose old content instead of thinking of something new?

Cami: Yeah, right. So, we all know the importance to have a content strategy to create touchpoints with users, audiences at different stage of the journey. And we all know the struggle of thinking about new ideas like you said. So, whether users are turning to search engines to learn how to define a problem, an issue, or to research a solution, compare it with different other solutions, the plan is to map out a content strategy that can capture search interest at different stages, and provide valuable answers to users every time.

So, for small industries, topics could be a bit dry. So, and by dry I mean, like, not many questions, or not many…not much search interest around the particular topic, which is important for that industry. And then repurposing would be, you know, giving new life to your piece of content and just build on that. So, now…

Bec: Is that what we'd call evergreen content, like when you revive something that you've done in the past?

Cami: Yeah, absolutely. So, I can see, like, two ways to approach content repurposing. The first one evergreen, as you said, would be to refresh or recycle an old article, which is very popular, because over time, you know, that blog post can get stale, and they probably don't perform as well as they used to. So, refreshing those posts, revising them, adding value, new stats, updating, you know, the content, adjusting…I don't know, like, you can do anything. Like, adjusting the search intent of the audience.

So, all of this is a great way to make this old piece of content, like, work harder for you. And when you republish it with new information, new value, usually, it makes it a bit more competitive. So for example, I look after a builder, who has a very specific piece of content, which we would call evergreen. And that drives about 30% of their site conversion. So, it's massive. And because the topic is pretty popular in searching terms of how many people search for, you know, these topics on Google.

And so as part of their SEO content strategy, we revise the piece of content, improve it every four months, to keep it, like, current, fresh, valuable, and answer more questions about the topic as the topic becomes more popular. And every time we republish this piece of content with updated information, we can see every time as I said, an increased performance in rankings, organic visits, and you know, that leads to even more qualified conversions. So, that's one way to repurpose your evergreen content is to refresh it, to recycle it, and republish.

Bec: Yeah. So, that's really great for SEO, then, isn't it? So, that would be…is that generally a big part of your SEO strategies? Or is this something you would…just sort of happens, you know, while you're working? Is this part of the strategy? Or does it just happen because this is how you work?

Cami: Well, a bit of both. Obviously, when you look at what's driving traffic to websites, there's usually like a couple of pieces of content that are very popular every time. But traffic tends to decrease when the blog posts become old because maybe there's new questions that haven't been answered. Or maybe there's new stats coming up. So, as part of my job, I look at those popular blog posts around the topic and we try to refresh them every four months or so as I said, to give them a new life, and provide new information and value.

Bec: Yeah, because you can make it into like an even bigger strategy, can't you? I mean, like one article that you have, or one old blog post could be turned into a podcast, sort of like what we're doing. You can split it up into, like, small social media posts, infographics. Do people still do infographics?

Cami: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's kind of the simple approach to content repurposing, which is to republish your existing piece of content in a completely different format, different platform. Like you said, like turning an article into an infographic, into a video, or even an eBook, if relevant. And the goal would be to add a bit more value, or like a different kind of value into that initial piece of content to, you know, the next format you're going for.

Bec: Yeah, well, I mean, turning your blog post into an eBook is a really interesting one. Because that can actually take on a new life of its own as a new campaign. If you're wanting to, you know, gather data, or build your list even.

Cami: Yeah, exactly. And the goal is not to, you know, PDF a piece of content that you can have online. So, that's why it's very important to, you know, like, add a bit more value and or different value, as I said, just because you're potentially exposing your content to new audiences with new needs and search paths. So, you don't want to just copy and paste a piece of content onto a different platform? I mean, you can, but that would be, yeah…

Bec: Because that's too easy. That's too easy. We want to make it…we want to put some effort in. So, a couple of, like, cool things that I've come across lately, and something that I'm a little bit obsessed with in my downtime is Quora, which is a question and answer website. And I have noticed a lot of people in the marketing space are basically turning, you know, questions and answers from, like, their frequently asked questions, or, you know, they're solving a problem into a Quora answer, which is really cool because that also gives you a link back to the website.

Cami: Yeah, absolutely. And with Quora, whenever you Google something, like a question or, you know, researching a solution to a problem you have identified, Quora questions and answers are very popular. Because, you know, they have this…a system which provides the best answer to your question. So, that's very popular with search engines. And you can definitely take inspiration from all the answers provided. And as an expert on a particular topic, you can really, you know, like, work hard to provide a way better answer and publish it on the website, contribute to the Quora platform and link back to your website, a bit more of a SEO strategy. But yeah, I guess the end goal here is to uncover all those questions users or audiences are asking actively on Quora or other websites, and come up with a better answer, like a more complete picture, and reestablish authority.

Bec: Yeah. I guess this is sort of off-topic. But I guess if you wanted to go the other way, you could look at the popular questions and answers in your industry, and then come up with a better question. Even like, you could ask the question yourself, and then answer it to sort of have that specific question. Like, because if you can see people asking that question in search, or like on your internal search on your website, you can create an entire new post on Quora based on that, so that you then cover that real estate, too.

Cami: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Great idea.

Bec: Yeah, and I love it. Whenever I have some downtime, I'm on Quora just trolling. There's so many topics. It's crazy.

Cami: Yeah, it's very entertaining. I spend a lot of time on Quora as well.

Bec: Yeah, last week, got the Quora app out. So…

Cami: I guess, you know, like, everybody has to go through the process of doing a keyword research. And there's so many ways to do it. You can use AdWords Keyword Planner Tool. You can use Quora as well. And as a public, there's so many tools out there to really gather all these questions, like, an audience ask about a specific topic. And this is kind of, you know, the research work you have to do to come up with a perfect content strategy, and then think about ideas of how to repurpose all those answers and spread them out onto different platforms for adding more exposure in search.

Bec: Yeah, and I think what you said earlier about, you know, clients or industries that have really dry content, like where there might not be a huge amount of variation, it's going to be so valuable for that. Because, I mean, I know I've had clients in the past that manufacture bricks, you know, things like that, and you…after a while, you just really struggle to think, "Okay, how can I talk about bricks this week?" There's only so many abstract ways to do it. So, having these kind of tools and ideas is pretty good.

Cami: Yeah, absolutely.

Bec: Okay, so what do you think, Cami, would be the number one thing for our listeners to do to get started repurposing content? I mean, should they have a look at what they've already got and just start like going through our sort of little checklist and changing things up? Or maybe do some research first? What do you think?

Cami: Okay, well definitely do some research first. So, what we've gone through, like, the process of undertaking a keyword research, like, we said earlier and going on to create Quora or other tools to just get a sense of what people search about a topic in particular. And then you can start building your content strategy by mapping out copyright topics by search intents, or stages. It all depends on, you know, on your industry. And then a good practice would be to think about at least two or three ways to repurpose a specific piece of content. So, let me explain. As an example, let's say you are a marketing agency, and you wrote a very interesting article about, I don't know, what is local SEO, for example, where you explain what it is, why it's so important to what the approach to take to optimize a website for local SEO.

So, that's your main piece of content, which could be a blog post, and ideally, you will update it very regularly. And then think about two or three other ways to repurpose that blog post. So, you can repurpose this by creating something like more visual, like a video animation, which explain more concepts of local SEO. So, that's one. And then you can turn this article into an eBook and add more value to it, like, I don't know, creates, like, actionable checklists, for example. So, that's two.

Yeah, so they have something to take away, which is different, you know, from the content on the blog post. And maybe finally, you can record a podcast about it with a panel of experts, you know, which have a discussion about local SEO. So, that's three. And number four, why not creating a YouTube video about local SEO? And then your added value would be to include all the answers to questions users may have asked in comments in the initial blog post or on different platform. So yeah, that's it.

When you've done your research, you really brainstorm, maybe two, three, or four ways to repurpose one topic. And that's how you expand. And that's how you can really come up with a very good content strategy that can last for, you know, like, a year or few months. And that would be my main advice.

Bec: Yeah, no, that's really awesome. And it just really shows that you only have to come up with a couple of cool ideas. And then you can split it up, repurpose it. And yeah, have a strategy for a few months. And I think a lot of people will be really relieved to hear that because, you know, I remember like, back in the day, I would have, you know, a legal pad with a list of…a whole bunch of, you know, blog titles, and they were all just slightly different. So yeah, definitely a better strategy.

Cami: Yeah, exactly. For like, you know, small businesses or, you know, dry industries where there's not much going on. If you have like a core top 10 topics, you can actually expand into maybe like, potentially 40 pieces of content to republish somewhere. So yeah, repurposing content is really so important for, yeah, any kind of business.

Bec: Yeah, fantastic. Okay, cool. Let's finish it off there. And I think in our transcript, we might actually link you guys up with a PDF to download with a bit of a checklist there for you for repurposing content. So, scroll down on the page and you should see a little download link below. All right, thank you so much for joining me today, Cami.

Cami: Awesome, pleasure Bec.

Bec: Cool. Cool. And, yeah, we'll chat to everyone later. Thanks for listening.

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