5 Steps to Refresh and Repurpose Outdated Content

The beauty of the speed and breadth of the web today is anyone can find any of your content, anywhere, at any time. They could find it in the SERP, a partner website, an industry publication, an independent blogger, and product review website…sky’s the limit!

Of course, this means anyone can find any of your content, anywhere, at any time…including old, outdated blog posts. Sure, most people don’t expect for all your content to be immediately relevant, especially if it was published in 2015. But they still might wander off to another source that has better information.

There are many reasons to refresh and repurpose your old content, but these two are top of our list:

1. It ensures anyone who comes across an old blog or eBook gets the most updated, relevant version of the information with a timestamp or callout — a pleasant surprise.
2. A republished version of a content piece that is SEO-optimized has a better chance of being surfaced by search engines over an old one, giving your website and your brand reliability a boost.

This is probably not mind-blowing information for most marketers, but what follows is: Let’s look at how to effectively refresh and repurpose old content to keep your SEO engine running.

What content should you refresh and repurpose?

The first question you have to ask yourself before tackling this mountain is: What content is a good candidate for an uplift?

Well, the answer to that question is pretty simple, isn’t it? Everything!

Actually, no. You may have evergreen content that doesn’t necessarily need much massaging. You also likely have some blogs or eBooks that are better candidates for a refresh than others — and if you’ve got thousands of articles published on your website, it’s important to prioritize.

We recommend starting with blogs, infographics, and eBooks that:

• Contain stats more than three years old. Definitely refresh anything that includes pre-COVID data. The world changed so much in those few years, nothing before 2020 feels relevant anymore.
• Include the mention of events that occurred more than 3-4 years ago.
• Discuss well-known technologies as if they are new (aka “Companies are starting to see the value of moving to the cloud” or “DevOps is a new method of bringing efficiency into the software development lifecycle”).
• Mention or focus on old versions of platforms that have since been updated.
• Have high visibility across your website

5 Steps to Breathe New Life into your Old Content

Let’s get into this in more depth and discuss a specific process you can use to refresh and repurpose old content from start to finish — as well as some repurposing ideas.

Step 1: Complete a content inventory
I know, you were secretly hoping this wasn’t the first step because it’s a massive P.I.T.A.

But I’m afraid you can’t get around this one. You can certainly dive in and just start refreshing content with no plan, but you’ll likely end up with a lot of gaps and missed opportunities.

Set up an excel spreadsheet or report in your project management software and include these fields:

• Publish date
• Type (blog, infographic, eBook, etc)
• Length (if you want to prioritize longer content pieces or shorter ones)
• Topic category (if you group topics together and have a specific category you want to focus on)
• Targeted keyword(s)
• SEO ranking (this will help you prioritize high-ranking blogs)
• Leads generated (for gated content)
• Why does it need to be updated? (you could say stats, outdated events, outdated trends, or provide a more detailed description)
• Level of effort ranking (to help you go after the easiest, lowest hanging fruit)
• Priority

Here’s an example of what your spreadsheet might look like:

Start cataloging every content piece within your library. If this is a lengthy effort, choose a particular topic area or SEO ranking you’re most concerned about so you can move on to the next step, even if your entire inventory isn’t complete.

Pro tip: Use the tools you have available. If you have SEMRush or Ahrefs, you can likely export much of this information straight from the tool to avoid manual work. I also found a cool tool called SEO Spider by Screaming Frog that will crawl and analyze your web pages for SEO issues. I imagine there is also an export capability, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Your first 500 URLs are free, so it’s a great option for smaller websites.

Step 2: Prioritize your list and find a starting point
When your list is complete, you can sort it however you like to determine what is the best starting point for updating and repurposing your content. You may want to prioritize a particular column, such as leads generated so you start with the most effective content pieces. You could also go after low-hanging fruit and knock out the content that has a low level of effort.

We recommend starting with your oldest content and working your way forward, but you can still sub-categorize to further prioritize your list.

Whatever you decide, be sure it aligns with your overall marketing strategy and gets you closer to your goals, whether that’s higher website traffic, higher quality leads, or more effective nurture tracks.

Step 3: Create a Refresh Method
Refreshing your old content doesn’t necessarily mean doing a full rewrite for each piece. You may want to start by simply updating the statistics for each piece of content as a first step. Some content pieces may not need more effort than that so you can basically update them and mark them complete.

Others may require updates to verbiage, versioning, events and if some cases, full rewrites. You have a few options here:

1. Evaluate each content piece as you build your list and create a column on your spreadsheet to define which ones need which level of updating. Prioritize accordingly.
2. Create an iterative process where
   • your first round of updates corrects stats
   • the second updates verbiage
   • and the third updates targeted keywords.
3. Simply start with the first row and go through one-by-one, giving each content piece the attention it deserves.

There’s no right or wrong way to do this, it just depends on your goals and priorities. Take the time to talk through your approach with leadership to ensure you’re on the same page.

Step 4: Start refreshing!
Now it’s time for the fun part (if you enjoy writing): Start refreshing! Jump onto Google and look for updated reports, studies, and stats for each article. We also highly recommend using Perplexity to uncover recent stats and trends. As with an AI, check your work, but it has a much higher success rate (not as many 404s) than ChatGPT when it comes to research.

It can be difficult to determine what parts of a content piece to update and which ones to leave alone. If you’re a perfectionist like me, you’re likely to be tempted to rewrite the entire thing, even when it isn’t necessary. But if you only update stats and don’t look at the surrounding text and overall article approach, you could wind up adding resources and information that doesn’t fit the flow of your article.

We recommend reading your article from the perspective of your target audience, rather than the perspective of an editor. They are likely much more interested in the data you provide and the story you’re telling than they are in the sentence structure or vocabulary you use.

Update the information and ideas that are most likely to stick out for them first, and be sure to adjust introductory and follow-on sentences. Then spend a few minutes zooming out and reviewing the article as a whole to make sure all of the concepts align.

Step 5: Look for repurposing opportunities
This step doesn’t need to happen numerically — it can just as easily be completed while you’re building your inventory spreadsheet. But if refreshing content is your main goal, this is a good follow-up task to complete as you’re going through each content piece and evaluating what needs to be updated.

So many content pieces are a natural fit for repurposing elsewhere on your website or through partner portals or social media. Here are some simple repurposing ideas to get you started:

✓ Repurpose an eBook into several topic-centered infographics
✓ Turn a thought leadership blog into a series of social media posts
✓ Take a high-ranking blog and turn it into an explainer video
✓ Chop up a few customer interviews you’ve conducted for case studies and create a video board about a specific service or feature
✓ Condense a customer story into a highlight image you can post on social media
✓ Combine several blogs on a similar topic into an eBook
✓ Pull audio quotes from interviews with your SMEs and combine them into a short podcast or repurpose them for a social media post
✓ Use important stats from an infographic to support your web copy and bring more visual elements to your website
✓ Take a “9 Ways” or “7 best practices” eBook and republish it as a blog series
✓ Write a follow-up blog to a challenge or event you’ve previously written about

There are so many ways to slice and dice your content; feel free to get creative! Mix and match media types, topics, and channels and see what you can come up with. I’m willing to bet you have another 100+ content pieces hiding in the words you’ve already written.

Need Help? Get it Thrū Content

Whether you prefer to hand off the stress of your content inventory, or need help updating hundreds of content pieces, Thrū Content has you covered. We have executed detailed content maps, strategies, and refreshes for our clients so they know all the boxes were checked and no stones were left unturned.