Historical Optimization | Brafton

What happens to your older marketing content? Think about your blog posts with outdated facts and figures in them, or with information that doesn’t reflect your company’s current strategy. They’re sitting there on your website, at best just lying fallow and at worst giving people a mistaken impression about your business.

Is it time to just delete those posts, or should you leave them there in the hopes that they’ll draw in some curious Google search users despite their age? It turns out that, at least for some kinds of content, there’s another option within the search engine optimization (SEO) toolkit. You can turn old blog posts or extended articles into newly relevant parts of your SEO-based content marketing strategy through periodic updates.

Adding old content revisions and revamps into your overall digital marketing strategy can help you in several ways. While you’re capitalizing on the work that went into old blog posts, you’re simultaneously building fresh relevance and potentially attracting fresh eyes to your work. This is the value of historical content optimization.

What Is Historical Content Optimization?

Historical content optimization means updating old posts to make them newly relevant to your SEO marketing strategy. In some cases, this will mean refreshing facts and figures and removing outdated references to keep posts current. In others, it’s about making additions to keep the article ranking well for a chosen SEO term, or changing it to target a different term.

Sometimes, your best bet is to make multiple kinds of changes at once. This means going over a piece of historical blog content in depth, looking for old details that need a refresh while also performing SEO analysis and inserting new keywords.

It’s also worth noting that older content reoptimization is about more than what’s in the body copy. You can also take a look at the post’s title and meta description, along with any links contained within the text. A thorough revamp, taking all these areas into account, can turn an outdated or irrelevant blog post into a fresh piece of your content strategy.

Historical content optimization is a different process from creating a new blog post from scratch. For one thing, you have performance data about the existing post to work from, so you can make purposeful and targeted changes designed to make the new version more compelling. As another benefit, you don’t have to invest as much time as if you were producing a wholly new post.

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

While historical blog optimization can’t be the only piece of an SEO strategy — of course it can’t, or you’d never get content in the first place — it is a potentially valuable tactic and one worth considering across industries.

Benefits of Historical Optimization

Historical optimization is a way to squeeze more life out of content that’s already produced good results for your brand. Or, perhaps even more important, it’s a path to make content useful if it didn’t reach a large audience on its initial release.

Some of the most notable ways in which repurposing content can deliver a return on investment include:

• Taking value from existing work: Getting the most out of your content marketing spend can mean gaining value in the here and now from work that was completed months or years ago. That’s one reason why historical blog optimization is so useful. The bones of high-quality content pieces already exist, meaning that even a thorough set of updates will take less time or effort than producing something new.
• Improved traffic from old posts: If you don’t update older posts that have stopped drawing in search engine traffic, their value to your site is relatively negligible. If you do make these changes, however, you can improve the overall SEO value of your site. You can choose whether to refresh the posts to target the same keywords as their initial versions or to pivot to newly relevant terms.
• Potential coordination with other marketing campaigns: A freshly refreshed blog post is ready to receive exposure through other digital marketing channels. Maybe it can serve as the featured story in your latest email newsletter, or receive a post on your social media channels. This is a good way to create a synergistic and strong multichannel marketing campaign.
• Organic relevance to customers searching for information: When you revise blog posts, you aren’t just appealing to a search algorithm. You’re also making those articles more relevant and interesting to people who are looking to your brand to provide up-to-date information, whether about your own products or a more general topic in your industry. Even in a highly digitized marketing climate, it’s always good to think about your actual readers.

Optimizing existing content can be a quick alternative to producing new content or an exercise designed to draw value from a long back catalog of articles. No matter how you conceptualize the process, it’s an intriguing way to turn your blog archive into a new asset.

How To Choose Which Blogs To Reoptimize and Republish

What’s the mark of an old blog post that deserves to be reoptimized 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, evergreen posts are still performing well years later and don’t need much help. In other cases, content isn’t likely to be much use, even if you refresh it.

The best candidates for revision fall into a third category: These are posts that were highly productive at one point, but their usefulness has faded over time. You can determine which articles meet these criteria by measuring based on your brand’s favored metrics.

Some articles are designed to drive conversions, others to attract curious customers at the top of the marketing funnel and provide them with helpful information. By using metrics including bounce rate and conversion rate, you can find content that has seen a drop-off in its performance over the past few months or years and isn’t currently driving value.

Once you find the right posts for revision purposes, it’s valuable to keep tracking content metrics after updated content has gone live. There are valuable insights to be had if you keep following SEO performance. Maybe the piece still isn’t hitting the mark, and there’s more you can do. Or perhaps it’s become a powerful new part of your content lineup and is worth a wider spotlight via multichannel outreach.

Keeping your brand’s primary guides and explainer articles up to date is likely a good way to apply this approach. If you notice that a major, in-depth article about a key concept in your industry is no longer drawing much traffic, or that viewers are bouncing quickly, that’s a great indication that it’s time to apply revisions.

How Often Should You Repurpose Content?

The ideal frequency for revising older content depends on your industry. It’s worth asking how often the information in your articles becomes outdated when setting your schedule.

For example, consider Brafton’s position dispensing advice on content marketing. Our evergreen articles on search engine optimization receive periodic updates based on best practices that shift every few years, driven by updates to Google’s search algorithm and other major shifts in content production. That could mean everything from Twitter’s change to X to the rise of generative AI.

Whether your industry’s norms change slowly or the landscape shifts every few months, it’s worth slotting your content updates into a regular and predictable content production calendar. Rather than treating reoptimization projects as extraordinary or occasional events, you can program them to occur alongside new blog creation, video production, newsletter composition and other marketing activities.

Treating historical content optimization as another regular strategic piece to consider within your content operations framework allows you to treat each piece with the focus it deserves. While it’s true that optimizing content is faster than producing a new piece — and this is part of its appeal — you shouldn’t toss these reoptimization projects off carelessly. They can drive impressive results and are worth a little extra polish.

Ready To Refresh Your SEO Strategy for New and Old Content?

If you’ve never thought about content reoptimization, you may be sitting on a goldmine of older articles that aren’t driving much traffic now, but are a few tweaks away from renewed relevance. This is one of the most exciting parts of historical content optimization: It turns content that’s hiding in plain sight into a new source of value.

If you’re just setting out on your content creation journey, you can bookmark this article and come back to it in a few months, once your pieces start to fade from their initial relevance. Then it will be time to optimize old blog posts, drawing new life from your work.