When you publish a post, you probably feel a sense of accomplishment as you check it off your SEO list. But once your content is out there it's easy to forget about it as you work on the next new piece.
Over time, neglected content can become stale, meaning its search rankings will drop in addition to the number of overall visitors and conversions it gains.
To overcome this issue, you can refresh your existing blog content to revive stale blogs and positively impact your SEO. This approach eliminates unnecessary time, effort, and expenses normally associated with creating an entirely new post from scratch. Plus, you’ve already vetted your existing content’s worthiness, especially if the original was already compelling enough to rank and be linked to in the first place.
Let’s take a look at why creating a new article from an old post can be impactful for SEO and how the process can be even further simplified with the help of an AI article rewriter.
Within this post, you will learn:
- The benefits of refreshed blog content
- How to refresh old content on your blog
- The most efficient way to make your old blogs unique
- How to use an AI article rewriter to refresh your blogs
What are the benefits of refreshed blog content?
Increased organic traffic and click-through rates
Search engines prioritize fresh content, and even top-performing content can become stale and ultimately lose its positioning. As posts age, newer posts replace them and the older posts are less likely to be discovered by potential customers. Up-to-date information is applauded by both viewers and search engines when determining ranking results whereas older, stale content has no benefit to either.
Improved authority and relevancy
Authority and relevancy are often regarded as the primary factors that dictate search ranking.
Without going into too much detail, in large part, authority is scored by the number of backlinks a site has. Generally, search engines consider each backlink an endorsement, so, the more backlinks you have, the more authoritative your website is. Search engines use this information to help prioritize authoritative web pages when determining where to rank content the SERP.
To consistently attract new backlinks and build authority, continually publish up-to-date, fresh content viewers will want to reference.
Relevancy is a factor search engines consider when determining if content on a site is well-aligned with the searcher’s intent. To create relevant content, understand what your users want and are searching for, then write content that addresses those needs.
Search engines’ primary goal is to deliver the most useful information to the user. To maintain these standards, Google’s Search Algorithm analyzes billions of web pages to assess which sites are most relevant to a given search query. This means that relevant content ranks higher and has a greater chance of being read by potential new customers.
Increased depth of unique content coverage
Most digital marketers make the mistake of only writing a little bit about many different topics. Increasing authority requires content depth, which means you should publish posts about your core offerings frequently to demonstrate subject-matter expertise.
But, simply duplicating existing blog posts to scale the amount of content on your site does not help improve SEO. Search engines ignore identical content, so instead, refresh your good ideas in unique ways. By creating refreshed posts about your core offerings, your depth of unique content can increase, thereby improving visibility on search engines.
How do I refresh old content on my blog?
Determine what content is worth updating
If you’re new to blogging, you may want to focus on creating your first cluster of posts before refreshing content. If you have already published multiple articles, however, it’s probably time to revisit these posts.
After a content audit, your refresh strategy should focus on the following blog categories:
- Posts with high traffic and low conversion rates
- Posts with low traffic and high conversion rates
- Former popular content with results that are now beginning to slip
- Research articles that need to include new and updated information
- Articles that almost rank high, and may need a little boost
- Review site analytics to locate terms you currently rank for that have an average position (current ranking order) higher than 20. Essentially, any posts that do not have natural visibility on the first 2 pages of the SERPs. Once you know these terms, locate the corresponding blogs for each, and better optimize them by giving them a refresh.
Make the content unique so you can create a new post
Once you have determined which blogs to refresh, the first step is to rewrite them to create completely unique posts or multiple posts. If done manually, this process can still be very time-intensive. An AI article rewriter tool like WordAi can more efficiently create multiple unique posts from one original piece of content in seconds (we’ll get into this more later on).
Do I need to rewrite my entire blog?
When refreshing content, some marketers simply make small updates or copy adjustments throughout.
But given that creating a new, unique post will help you increase the depth of your content coverage, minor changes won’t cut it. Instead, we recommend an extensive refresh of content lacking recent updates to make sure the content is unique and differentiated.
As mentioned, completely rewriting posts manually can be challenging, especially if you have many blogs to refresh on a consistent basis. Therefore, it is important to take advantage of tools that automate the rewriting part of the process.
Use an AI article rewriter
AI article rewriters, like WordAi, eliminate the effort and time required to update your old content and do the refreshing for you automatically.
Expand and update your content
Once you have rewritten your content to make it unique, expand on it by adding more relevant and up-to-date information. This can increase word count if the original post was too thin, or if new research on your topic has surfaced.
In addition to updating the content copy, additional refresh techniques include:
Improve headlines and heading tags
Just like your blog body content, headings can also become stagnant over time. Write new headings (H1) and sub-headings (H2, H3, etc.) to fine-tune the inclusion of your target keywords. In addition, make sure to properly format heading tags in HTML in descending order. Headings and their tags are important indicators for content relevancy for ranking purposes and user readability.
Update or add visuals, videos, and infographics
You’ll want to audit the media used throughout any original posts and determine areas where it may make sense to add updated visuals. This could mean new photos, videos, infographics, etc.
When ranking results, search engines also take into consideration image file names and any alt text assigned to the image. If refreshing images, make sure both the file name and alt text go hand in hand with the blog content.
Add or update links
When including internal or external links, confirm any existing links are still active (replace any broken links) and that any new links are from a credible source.
Repromote refreshed content
As soon as your refreshed content is ready to share, it’s wise to repromote the newly updated content. Refreshed content has a leg up over fresh content since you already have data on who engaged with the original. When repromoting, identify what worked well (or didn’t) after the initial push, then either mimic or revamp your strategy.
We also recommend locating web pages that have already linked to the original content. From there, connect with the author to notify them of the refreshed post. Chances are, they’ll want to use the newly improved version and market it yet again, especially if it includes up-to-date data.
The most efficient way to make your old blogs unique
As discussed above, the most important first step in creating a new, refreshed article is to make it unique. And, the most efficient way to make any content unique is to automate the rewriting aspect.
But, not all rewriting tools are created equally, and only the most advanced technology can rewrite concepts uniquely without losing original intent.
Use AI to rewrite your articles
Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years and only continues to improve by the day.
Put simply, AI takes article rewriting to another level. AI article rewriters produce high-quality rewrites indistinguishable from those written by humans. As evidenced by a recent case study we conducted, readers could not tell the difference between content that was rewritten by WordAi and the original content created by human writers.
Best of all, AI article rewriters like WordAi can execute a full blog rewrite in seconds, allowing you to increase your amount of SEO-optimized content, without increasing workload.
In addition to a more efficient process, using an AI to rewrite articles can help you by:
Filling out your content calendar
You want to create and publish content regularly, but sometimes you run out of ideas. An AI article rewriter can help you produce new pieces of content quickly from existing articles or blog posts, allowing you to easily fill out your content calendar with ease.
Increasing uniqueness
Publishing unique content regularly can be exhausting, especially if creating multiple posts about the same topic. Tools like WordAi can create up to 1,000 unique rewrites, just from one single article.
Extending your marketing budget
WordAi can make your marketing dollars go further by scaling your content production process at a fraction of the cost.
How to use an AI article rewriter to refresh your blogs
By now, it should be clear that refreshing your older blog content should be a part of your current SEO strategy if it’s not already.
From improved authority and credibility to increased website traffic and depth of unique content coverage, the advantages of refreshed old blog content are clear.
Luckily, you can breeze through the content refresh process with the help of an AI article rewriter.
To begin refreshing your content in a matter of seconds, check out the WordAi free trial to create content that your customers will love.