Re-Optimizing your Content: The Step-by-Step Guide

Whether you’re a content writer or any kind of digital marketer, you’ll know that your brand’s content is important. Whatever you post, no matter the word length – it needs to be seen and read by your audience constantly. So that you get the most value out of it.

Isn’t it true that the main goal of content marketing is to gain the attention of your target audience through relatable content?

So, we already know that creating great content is essential to gain web traffic from your target audience, but it’s not enough to only post new content. You need to make sure that you can distribute and revitalise your content effectively. 

Optimizing content is important for a few reasons. Firstly, your content can decay over time. Secondly, your content carries high value in the long run. Additionally, the intention of your audience in their searches will change over time – and you may need to change things up to be seen properly. 

This process is also known as re-optimization. But how can you go about dealing with optimizing content? 

Tips for re optimizing content

Fear not – here are our top tips for optimizing content.

Study search results and intent.

This gives you an immediate insight into what your audience wants. This is where you would enter your focus keywords, as well as secondary keywords, in order to see their ranking on search engine results pages, or SERPS. You can check for similarities in content, including headings, tags and more. 

By following this process, you’re figuring out why people are searching for these specific keywords, and uncovering exactly what they want to know when searching. Your content should match the general search intent. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t hurt to add an SEO optimized article or two that fit this bill. Some things to consider when optimizing content include the age of your content and the subject that is covered.

 

Check for outdated/inaccurate information and update your content.

This seems pretty self-explanatory, but it can be easy to forget to do this! No matter how careful your research is, there’s a strong likelihood that your content could become inaccurate over time. As a general rule, you should check your content regularly to ensure that it is still accurate. 

Mentioning a specific study or outdated current event can speak volumes about the age of your content. Your recommendations could become outdated. Businesses could change, restaurants could close, new laws can be introduced and your top tips could be less useful than before. Take note of elements in your content which could become outdated. 

This depends on the industry and topic of your content. You can change the publish date to your edit date in order to improve the age of your content. This date can become important for SEO, and can make your content seem fresher to your audience.

 

Add visuals to your content, including images and videos.

Don’t underestimate the importance of optimizing an image. This is a great way to increase the value of your content.

You can think of optimizing content as a way to add multimedia elements to your content. If you’re looking at updating a product page, why not include a video tutorial or testimonial? 

You may want to include specific images that explain your content better. The benefit to using and optimizing an image in an SEO optimized article is that people can browse and read your article at a faster rate. If the content browsing experience is enjoyable for your audience, they’ll be likely to stay on your website and explore further. This can be beneficial for your brand’s SEO. 

It’s important to note that you should be making use of the appropriate alt tags, image tags, file names and file sizes when working with visuals. 

 

Rewrite your content.

This may seem like the action with the most effort, but it yields worthwhile results!  You need to make sure that your content is best suited for your audience – whose demographic may change over time, too. 

The purpose of your content should be to offer high-quality, high-value information. This is also where making sure you’ve got an SEO optimized article or two on your website. An SEO optimized article is an important tool in your arsenal. It is one of the main methods of attracting the right audience to your content.

Things to include in your SEO optimized article include keywords, adding relevant information that people actually want to read. What can you tell your audience that no one else can? You can also make your word fresh long enough for SEO rankings, and check your analytics to improve your content’s performance.

 

Is your website optimized?

This is another vital element that can often be overlooked.

Optimizing your website can include many different things, and is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Did you know that having a fast page load time can impact your SEO results? That’s why running a webpage speed test is extremely important, and can help you improve your page speed. You can use a free tool like Google PageSpeed as a starting point.

Optimizing your website also involves checking for mobile-friendliness and responsive design. Regardless of when you published your content, your content should be accessible to your mobile audience. Your page should load correctly on a variety of computers, smartphones and tablets. If you don’t attend to this, it could negatively impact your SERP rankings. 

It may involve something as simple as changing an image, but it can mean a world of difference for your SEO. Other things to consider include title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords and keyword-rich URLs. 

 

Post your content to social media.

If you’re not sharing your content to as many channels as possible, you’re missing out on potential audience engagement. Believe it or not, posting your longer-form content like a blog post or SEO optimized article to social media can help out a lot. By doing this, you’re allowing more people to read your content and potentially buy into your brand. 

It’s one thing to share the odd link every once in a while, but remember to spend a lot of time building relationships with your customers and allowing them to fully engage with your content. 

 

Ready to optimize your content?

Optimizing content is important for keeping your content relevant and well-distributed. It’s all too easy to publish your content and forget about it – but this could be harming your SEO blogging results in the long-run. It’s important that you always look to your SEO, as this is an important way of attracting your target audience. 

Some of our top ways to re-optimize your content include: checking that your content matches the intent of your audience, updating any outdated or irrelevant information if your content is older than a year, adding visuals to content to enhance the inherent value, rewriting content when needed, optimizing your website for mobile devices and posting your content to social media. 

We understand that it takes a lot of resources to produce top-quality content; but you shouldn’t dismiss your content as soon as it goes live. Optimizing content can be a great way to improve your SEO rankings, as you’ll be displaying relevant and high-quality content to your audience even if their interests and intentions change over time.