If you follow TBS founders Cathy (Poor Little It Girl) and Jessica (An Indigo Day) you may have noticed they’ve been recirculating old blog posts. But what does that mean? Why should you, as a blogger, be utilizing and monetizing off of older content on your website. 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 posts 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 page with an existing page authority instead of publishing a brand new page 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 so 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. 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 tops 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.
Tips To Recirculating Old Content
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.
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 loves it) but the copy is about 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. 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 and was transformed 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. Cathy has a Nordstrom Anniversary Sale Post from four years ago that is no longer relevant and does not drive traffic to her site. If she’d like, she can delete these images and will want to update this post with a new Top 10 Shoes To Shop graphic, affiliate links, and change the publish date to 2019 to reflect the current sale period.
4. 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!)
5. 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 to reprogram your permalink structure so you can move forward with recirculating posts.
