You may have noticed that here at The Blog Societies, we sometimes share old blog posts. This is something we intentionally do and it’s called recirculating. It not only is good for business, but it’s a way to work smarter, not harder. Today, we’re going to dive into all the reasons to take what’s old and make it new again to drive more traffic and conversions.
What Does It Mean To Recirculate A Blog Post?
Recirculating an old blog post means you’re taking an older post that may either be a) converting well but doesn’t get a ton of traffic, or b) gets good traffic and could be getting more. By updating the post with a few of our tips and republishing it to the top of your blog feed (just hitting publish for right now!) you’ll not only be helping your SEO but also providing your new readers with great content.
Why Recirculating Old Content Is Beneficial To Your Blog
There’s definitely a reason why we’re looking at posts from 2, 3 or even 4 years ago. It can be super beneficial to your blog from a traffic and conversion standpoint to recirculate.
This strategy enables you to essentially re-publish a post with an existing page authority instead of publishing a brand new post which would have to start building its own page authority from scratch. Here are a few reasons why it’s beneficial to try this with old content on your blog.
Google Rewards Freshness
When you recirculate a blog post, you are updating it with today’s date. This tells Google that great-performing post is now fresh and popular. That’s great! This will help the post rank better and build your domain authority.
Search Engine And Domain Authority
By recirculating old blog posts you drive more traffic to it when it hits the top of your blog feed. You’ll also usually share your newest post on your social platforms too (you should by the way!).
This helps to improve upon the search engine authority which Google uses to rank your content. The better it is, the higher you rank.
Saves You From Creating More Content
By recirculating, you can blog less, but do more. Literally doing the most and the least. By spending a little time on older posts, you can sprinkle these into your content calendar and run a more efficient business. We particularly love this with evergreen content or seasonally appropriate ones.
How To Decide Which Posts To Recirculate?
Already Popular Posts
The easiest way to find out which posts resonate with your readers that could go for an update is to dive into your Google Analytics. By using GA, you can see what your top posts are for the past year and what kind of content is getting good traffic.
You want to be sure you’re updating posts that are ranking already with Google (read our post about SEO tips here) so the next time they crawl your site, your content is up to date and fresh. Here are the Steps to Finding Posts To Recirculate:
- Login to your Google Analytics >> Behavior >> Site Content >> Content Drilldown >>
From there, you’ll see various folders for the year. These are the posts and the pageview information for them. You may see posts from 2016 that get quite a bit of traffic. See how you can update those to make them new again!
Strong Converting Posts
This will require you to look at your rewardStyle or ShopStyle analytics. See which products are converting that are maybe older and clearly, you haven’t linked to in a while.
For some of you, this may be easier to find than others. But if you can figure out which posts are converting well, you can update them to convert AND drive more traffic. We recommend updating them with better photos, fresh affiliate links and so on.
Typically we like to update posts that are also providing multiple tips or ideas. Let’s say you have a “how to style a black blazer” blog post that has multiple outfit ideas. You should be adding to that post with new looks, tips and affiliate links.
Posts With Good Permalinks
Maybe your post isn’t quite performing that well just yet, but you know it can. Maybe the permalink and topic are good for your niche, but you just never wrote a great post in the first place. We’ve all been there. As in, the first few years we typically start our blogs, we aren’t focusing on SEO and great content. Guilty!
But maybe you have a fantastic permalink (this is the URL of the blog post) but the post just needs some help. Instead, make it a great post by starting over (so long as no traffic is really coming to it which you can double check in Google!) and put that great permalink to real use.
Add new photos, headings, keywords and then recirculate that post. Let’s dive into tips for recirculating old content so that it’s worth your while.
Tips For Recirculating Old Blog Posts
1. Update Affiliate Links
Once you find posts you want to recirculate, update the affiliate links to in-stock items. Make sure the products your readers can click on are ready to shop. This will keep them reading longer and shopping more. In turn, driving more sales and commission your way.
This is also why we LOVE using Collective Voice (formerly ShopStyle Collective) since you can name your widgets and easily update them. Learn more here.
2. Make It An Evergreen Post
Remove anything that dates the blog post. You want it to appear evergreen and always relevant no matter the time of year (if possible).
For example, if an outfit post you did two years ago is performing well for its images (think Pinterest and Google Search love it) but the copy is absolutely irrelevant to the images that aren’t helpful (we’re all guilty of this from time to time!) update the post with a helpful article instead. Or maybe you talk about how you went on a trip last week, and you mention the month or year. Remove these things that date your post.
Delete the copy and start fresh with tips that are relevant to the images. This is a great example of a post that had no real meaning to it initially. I had a blog post with juts an outfit that I liked and I talked about absolutely nothing in the post. It was more of an old school blog post update. But the permalink is GOOD. So I went in and was transformed the post to be a helpful style post on wearing denim for spring.
3. Add New Media
This can be videos, new Pinterest-friendly graphics, or images that relate to the topic at hand. Note: ONLY delete images from a blog post that are not relevant, bad quality and are not driving any traffic to your site. (If you remove a ranking image, you’ll be removing all the traffic you receive to that post).
For Example, Jessica’s Top Knot Post is 90% Google search image referral. She would NOT want to delete any of these old images. However, she DOES want to add in new Pinterest graphics, possibly a video tutorial and new affiliate links.
4. Make It SEO Optimized
Does your post have the right headings? How about good keywords? You may want to do a little keyword research to figure out how to optimize your post to ensure it performs its best. Add new keywords and additional headings throughout whenever possible.
And don’t forget about alt text and filling out your SEO Yoast plugin!
5. Reshare It
You’ll want to push out your newly recirculated blog post just like a new post so it gets new eyes and fresh traffic. This helps to reaffirm to Google that it is, in fact, a great post.
Plus, if people love this post so much, your new readers likely haven’t seen it! This can drive more pageviews and referral traffic your way boosting your monthly pageviews (and in turn, allows you to charge more for sponsored posts!)
6. Be Aware Of Permalinks
This blog tactic, although can be very beneficial, can only be done IF you do NOT have dates in your permalink. Creating tons of redirects on your site is counterproductive to your SEO and can be hurtful to blog traffic.
We recommend working with an SEO specialist like InfluencerSEO to reprogram your permalink structure so you can move forward with recirculating posts.
