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Google has spoken – and you’ll want to revive stale content in order to rank and show up in AI search.
One of the biggest challenges for many bloggers is to come up with new blog post ideas for content on a regular basis. Sure, it’s easy to just throw something together but that’s not really the point of content marketing. The whole point is to provide your target audience with quality content that establishes your place as an expert within a given industry or niche.
Even the best content marketers face writer’s block. When this happens (and it will), why not look back at an old blog post and write a retrospective post that sheds new light on the topic and link to the original post? Balancing the creation of new content with the revitalization of old posts is crucial for maintaining a strong SEO strategy.
As time goes on, your knowledge of a particular subject matter should evolve. It’s likely that the industry that you are blogging about has evolved as well. Depending on how long you have been blogging, you may have lots of great content that could use an update.
Why Revive Old Content?
Reviving old content is an essential part of maintaining a healthy and thriving blog. Your old blog posts can still hold immense value and generate significant traffic, but they might not be optimized for the latest search engine updates and ranking signals. By breathing new life into these posts, you can improve their SEO performance and attract new traffic to your site. Reviving old content helps you to:
- Improve Your Site’s Overall Quality and Relevance: Updating old content ensures that your blog remains a reliable source of up-to-date information.
- Increase Your Site’s Authority and Trustworthiness: Fresh, accurate content enhances your credibility and positions you as an industry expert.
- Enhance Your Brand’s Visibility and Credibility: Regularly updated content keeps your brand in the spotlight and builds trust with your audience.
- Drive More Organic Traffic to Your Site: Optimized content is more likely to rank higher in search engine result pages, leading to increased organic traffic.
- Boost Your Site’s Ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs): Search engines favor fresh, relevant content, which can help your site rank higher and attract new visitors.
By reviving old content, you not only improve your site’s performance but also provide your audience with valuable, up-to-date information.
Find blog posts with lots of comments
Clearly, not everyone that reads your blog takes the time to comment on it. Many blog readers skim the content, get the point, and are on to the next thing. If you have old blog content that got many more quality comments than usual, the subject matter must have been important to them. Why not revisit it?
If you’re using WordPress, simply click over to “posts” and then sort your post’s comments in descending order.
Read through the comments and create a new blog post incorporating the additional information. Be sure to quote the sources of the comments and notify them that they’ve been quoted and ask them to share on social!
Find Posts That Received Lots of Traffic and Juice Them Up
Check your analytics data to see if there are any posts that received an unusually high number of visitors. What was the post about? What new information can you add to ensure it remains fresh content?
Here’s a screenshot of a few of my most popular posts.
Notice that I didn’t pick the top post, rather I picked a post that was popular but could be improved to drive even MORE traffic.
How to Improve Your Post
In order to see exactly HOW to improve the post, I recommend that you use BuzzSumo.com. This is an AMAZING content marketing research tool.
Search and see what’s most shared
Simply click on Content Research and select “Most shared” then type in your keyword phrase. In my case, I used “branding exercises” because that is the keyword from the blog post I’d like to improve on.
Drill down to relevant sources
The next thing I did was select “only B2B publishers” (you can see that in the left-hand margin) because I didn’t want stories about Ivanka Trump or other consumer branding stories, I only wanted stories that were relevant to business owners.
Read the most popular blog posts
Then I clicked through to the most popular stories and read them to see what they included that I could add to my already great blog post.
This is where it gets interesting. Many content marketing experts will tell you to improve on already popular posts by adding graphics or by providing more detail, but when you actually try to do that, it might feel overwhelming. So I’m going to walk you through my process. One effective strategy is to use the ‘stale while revalidate’ approach, which allows caching systems to serve old content briefly while fetching updated content in the background, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Look for opportunities
One immediate idea is to see what other exercises these popular posts were including and add them to my post – thereby increasing my list of brand exercises. I can research other branding exercises provided by experts, include them in my list and give them credit. Also when the post publishes, I can tell them that I used their idea and they can then share that post. During content updates, if a stale object is served while a background revalidation is in progress, new revalidation will not be triggered for those subsequent requests until the stale-while-revalidate period expires.
Another idea might be to actually go through some of the exercises yourself and create worksheets and downloads that would help your readers easily implement these exercises.
Add Hot/Timely Topics to Old Blog Posts
Every good blog has a mix of timely and evergreen topics. As you’re checking out the daily headlines or trending topics in your industry, search through your older blog posts and see if you can combine the trend, news or hot topic of the day to an evergreen piece of blog content. This approach is similar to the ‘stale-while-revalidate’ directive in caching strategies, where a stale version of content is served temporarily while new content is being fetched.
Here’s an example of a story that is trending today; Trump has been blocking Twitter followers who are critical of him.
If you’ve written any articles about Twitter or how to gain followers, this might be an interesting blog post idea that will take advantage of a hot piece of news while providing valuable Twitter tips for your audience.
Create a Round-Up of You Favorite Articles
There’s no doubt that there are some blog posts that you are more proud of than others. Point out what you like so much about them and explain the writing experience and process. Include what you might change if you were writing it now.
Your blog post library is the best place to go to find these posts.
I’ve already shown you how to find the most popular articles, now you can go in and search for some of your FAVORITE articles. This is a terrific opportunity to take some articles that may not have gotten the attention you think they deserve and put them front and center so you can promote them again. The other benefit is that you will be creating internal links to great content. Here are a few articles that will explain why and how internal linking is good for your blog:
- Internal linking: 15 benefits for your website SEO
- How Important Is Your Internal Linking Strategy for SEO?
- The Benefits of Internal Linking (And How to Use This Technique Effectively)
- How External & Internal Links Impact Your Blog (& How To Tell The Difference)
Create a Best of the Worst List
It may be hard to admit, but there are probably posts that you look back at with slight embarrassment and think, Really, I wrote that? While you might not want to draw attention to those posts, they are evidence that you have grown and your audience will probably appreciate that. Pointing out your own flaws and recognizing mistakes that you might have made in the past humanizes you and makes you more relatable.
Just because your blog posts are categorized in the published section of your blogging platform, doesn’t mean that they are no longer valuable. The bottom line is that there are fresh new blog post ideas right in front of you. So if you’re feeling stumped, try these 5 blog post ideas and say good-bye to writer’s block.