Also, stale blog content can confuse your readers because it's likely not aligned with the current direction of your industry, and maybe even your own company. You can take simple steps to update your blog content and get more ROI from existing efforts without having to publish anything new. Take these three simple steps to recapture your audience's attention and turn your dated, low-performing content into something that drives results. Consolidate posts to create content pillars What are the most important topics to your audience? Look for opportunities to consolidate posts together, optimize for keywords, and turn the combined content into a "pillar"—one strong, up-to-date piece that combines the strong points of several related pieces of content into one. Having that stored content on hand will help you easily fuel your content efforts; and when you have a robust backlog of knowledge, you'll always have enough information to create (or refresh) content you identified in the first step. If you have a store of in-depth gated content on your site, make sure to include relevant calls to action throughout each blog post that you publish, as well as at the end of each article. Don't Forget Distribution You just spent all that time looking back at old content that was falling short, updating it, redirecting old links to new ones, and so on. So get creative with your tactics, but definitely promote any new pillar content on your social media channels and build relevant, high-quality backlinks to it. One of the most effective ways to build those backlinks is to guest-post on websites where your audience is already engaged.
It’s no secret: Companies publish tons of content every year. Some of it attracts readers, some of it even goes viral, but, unfortunately, most of it falls flat.
Over time, it’s easy to end up with a large logjam of mediocre content. At my company, we call it the “content graveyard.”
You may think it’s not a huge concern; unfortunately, though, all that mediocre content is doing actual harm.
With all that dead content out there, it’s very possible you have multiple articles on the same topic essentially competing with each other for search rankings. Also, stale blog content can confuse your readers because it’s likely not aligned with the current direction of your industry, and maybe even your own company.
Ultimately, stale content breaks trust with your audience, hurts your reputation, and doesn’t position your company as the go-to resource in your industry.
The good news: you can do something about underperforming blog content.
You can take simple steps to update your blog content and get more ROI from existing efforts without having to publish anything new.
Three Steps to Refresh Your Content
Stop adding headstones to your content graveyard. Take these three simple steps to recapture your audience’s attention and turn your dated, low-performing content into something that drives results.
1. Consolidate posts to create content pillars
What are the most important topics to your audience? Which topics do you want your brand to lead the conversation on? Pair that information with keyword research to identify where the biggest opportunities are for your company to show up on search.
Once you pick your topics, sift through your current blog content and list everything you already have that touches on those areas. Look for opportunities to consolidate posts together, optimize for keywords, and turn the combined content into a “pillar”—one strong, up-to-date piece that combines the strong points of several related pieces of content into one.
Don’t delete the posts that you combined. Instead, set up a 301 redirect that sends all of your shorter, less in-depth pieces to your pillar. Doing so will ensure you don’t have any duplicate content on your site, and it will allow you to capitalize on any backlinks to that content that you might have earned.
As a result, you will have…
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