What's happening to your old marketing content? Think of your blog posts containing outdated facts and figures, or information that doesn't reflect your company's current strategy. They're sitting there on your website, at best lying fallow and at worst giving people the wrong impression of your company.

Is it time to simply delete these posts, or should you leave them there in the hope that they'll attract curious Google search users despite their age? It turns out that, at least for certain types of content, there's another option in the SEO toolbox. You can transform old blog posts or in-depth articles into newly relevant elements of your SEO-based content marketing strategy through periodic updates.

Adding old content revisions and redesigns to your overall digital marketing strategy can help you in a number of ways. While you capitalize on the work done in old blog posts, you simultaneously create new relevance and potentially attract new eyes to your work. That's the value of historical content optimization.

What is historical content optimization?

Optimizing historical content means updating old publications to make them more relevant to your SEO marketing strategy. In some cases, this will mean updating facts and figures and removing obsolete references to keep publications up to date. In others, it means making additions to maintain the article's good ranking for a chosen SEO term, or modifying it to target a different term.

Sometimes it's best to make several types of changes at once. This means taking an in-depth look at a piece of historical blog content, searching for old details that need updating while performing an SEO analysis and inserting new keywords.

It's also worth noting that the re-optimization of older content is not limited to the body content. You can also look at the article's title and meta description, as well as any links contained within the text. A thorough overhaul, taking all these areas into account, can transform an obsolete or irrelevant blog post into a new element of your content strategy.

Optimizing historical content is a different process from creating a new blog post from scratch. For one thing, you have performance data on the existing post to work with, so you can make targeted, focused changes designed to make the new version more compelling. Another advantage is that you don't need to invest as much time as you would if you were producing a brand new post.

Your content creators can get excellent value for their time invested if they focus on careful, data-driven reviews that reflect effective SEO research. Even free tools like Google Search Console's basic analytics can help you stay on track.

While historical blog optimization can't be the only element of an SEO strategy - of course, it can't be, otherwise you'll never get any content in the first place - it's a potentially valuable tactic and one worth considering in all sectors.

Benefits of historical optimization

Historical optimization is a way of breathing more life into content that has already produced good results for your brand. Or, perhaps more importantly, it's a way of making content useful if it didn't reach a wide audience when it was first released.

Some of the most notable ways in which content reuse can generate ROI include:

• Adding value to existing work : Making the most of your content marketing spend can mean gaining value here and now from work done months or years ago. That's one of the reasons why historical blog optimization is so useful. The high-quality content elements already exist, which means that even a full set of updates will take less time or effort than producing something new.
• Improving traffic from old messages : If you don't update older publications that have stopped attracting search engine traffic, their value to your site is relatively negligible. However, if you do make these changes, you can improve the overall SEO value of your site. You can choose to update publications to target the same keywords as their original versions, or switch to newly relevant terms.
• Potential coordination with other marketing campaigns: A freshly updated blog post is ready for exposure via other digital marketing channels. Perhaps it can serve as a featured article in your latest e-newsletter, or receive a post on your social networks. It's a great way to create a strong, synergistic multi-channel marketing campaign.
• Organic relevance for information-seeking customers: When you revise blog posts, you're not just appealing to a search algorithm. You're also making those articles more relevant and interesting to the people who look to your brand to provide up-to-date information, whether it's about your own products or a more general topic in your industry. Even in a highly digitized marketing climate, it's always a good idea to think about your real readers.

Optimizing existing content can be a quick alternative to producing new content, or an exercise designed to extract value from a long catalog of articles. However you conceptualize the process, it's an interesting way to turn your blog's archives into a new asset.

How to select blogs for re-optimization and republishing

What is the brand of an old blog post that deserves to be re-optimized for a new audience? Is it simply content that has passed a certain age? In fact, the actual criteria are more nuanced than that. Sometimes, persistent publications still work well years later and don't need much help. In other cases, the content probably won't be of much use, even if you update it.

The best candidates for revision fall into a third category: these are items that were highly productive at one time, but whose usefulness has faded over time. You can determine which items meet these criteria by measuring against your brand's preferred indicators.

Some articles are designed to generate conversions, others to attract curious customers to the top of the marketing funnel and provide them with useful information. Using metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rate, you can find content that has declined in performance over recent months or years, and is currently not generating value.

Once you've found the right publications for review, it's worth continuing to track content metrics after the updated content has gone live. You can gain valuable insights if you continue to track SEO performance. Maybe the piece still isn't hitting the target, and you can do more. Or perhaps it has become a powerful new element in your content mix, and deserves to be highlighted via multi-channel distribution.

Keeping your brand's key guides and explanatory articles up to date is probably a good way to apply this approach. If you notice that a major, in-depth article on a key concept in your industry is no longer attracting much traffic, or that viewers are bouncing back quickly, this is a good indication that it's time to apply revisions.

How often should you reuse content?

The ideal frequency for revising older content depends on your industry. It's worth considering how often the information in your articles becomes obsolete when defining your schedule.

For example, consider Brafton's position providing advice on content marketing. Our ongoing articles on search engine optimization receive periodic updates based on best practices that change every few years, based on updates to Google's search algorithm and other major changes in content production. This could mean everything from Twitter's move to X to the rise of generative AI.

Whether your industry's norms change slowly or the landscape shifts every few months, it pays to fit your content updates into a regular, predictable content production schedule. Rather than treating re-optimization projects as extraordinary or occasional events, you can schedule them to occur alongside new blog creation, video production, newsletter composition and other marketing activities.

Treating historical content optimization as another regular strategic element to be considered in your content operations framework allows you to treat each element with the attention it deserves. While it's true that content optimization is faster than producing a new piece - and that's part of its appeal - you shouldn't drop these re-optimization projects lightly. They can yield impressive results and are worth a little extra polish.

Ready to update your SEO strategy for new and old content?

If you've never thought about content re-optimization, you may be sitting on a goldmine of older articles that aren't currently generating much traffic, but are just a few tweaks away from renewed relevance. This is one of the most interesting parts of historical content optimization: it transforms content hidden in plain sight into a new source of value.

If you're just starting out on your content creation journey, you can bookmark this article and come back to it in a few months' time, once your articles start to lose their initial relevance. Then it will be time to optimize the old blog posts, to give new life to your work.