Repurposing Content with SEO

Here’s a guide on how you can repurpose and optimize your marketing content for better engagement with SEO

There are way too many websites with 100s of blog posts that get 0 traffic, yet most creators are still creating 10+ new posts per month.

Rather than writing or re-writing content without understanding the fundamentals of how web-traffic works can take a hit on both your time and effort.

Here’s how you can repurpose and optimize your existing content with SEO and rank higher.

1. Which pages and keywords do you need to optimise?

We see this on a lot of blog posts. But no one really tells you a sure-fire way to do this withoust signing up on a bunch of SEO tools that charges you $999 per month.

Our goal here is to identify the blogs/ pages that are declining in performance, and to see which keywords rank from 1–4. Simply:

• Visit Google Search Console
• Filter for the last 28 days
• Export the keyword data
• Filter keywords in position 4–20
• Prioritise the queries for better ranking

After performing this, it’s just a matter of finding ways to better optimise for those keywords within your existing content.

Google Search Console page

2. Can the keywords be used to optimise the current headings?

Stop re-writing content. There’s a high chance that you don’t even need to.

Instead focus on the SEO ‘power factors.’ These include:

1. Title
2. Headings
3. Introduction
4. Keyword usage
5. Topics and entities
6. Featured snippets

3. Analyse competitor headings. What have they covered that you haven’t?

I use this pretty useful extension called “Detailed SEO extension” — this helps anyone pull up header titles (from H1-H4), meta titles and descriptions of any blog article or landing page.

Now go to a competitor blog that’s ranking so well for a set of keywords, dig up on how they have written their meta titles, descriptions to headings, its character limits and simply see how you can optimize your blog and fill in the gap. In order to increase the click through rate of your blog post, check how you can do it best with SEO, here.

Detailed SEO Expansion — Monitor your competitors headings and backlings :)

In the above image, one of the competitor blogs have used a unique H2 on “what technology should be used for content management startegy” — so I should consider using a similar title in my blog article.

The content gap can easily be analyzed using Ahrefs tool, where you take all the keywords your competitor ranks for and subtract the keywords that your own website ranks for. What you get is a list of keywords that you should be targeting.

Meanwhile see how you can focus on the SEO ‘power factors’ before you dive in to re-write the entire piece of content. This could be, 90% of the time a waste of your energy and time. Only re-write content in the cases of

1. Incredibly outdated
2. Not matching the intent
3. Poorly structured and written

4. What other search data can you include in your headings/sections?

a) Autosuggest

b) People also ask

c) Related searches

5) Are there any other marketing assets you’d like to include?

If there’s anyway of improving your existing article, it also can be done by adding new information that you have about your customers, images, testimonials, videos or guides. The question we need to constantly ask is how can we do better than the page that ranks on first.

6) Is the content structured optimally?

An optimally structured article gives the user a good readability experience, which means the article needs to be easily skimmable and it covers all the topics that a user may need to know about. Consider using the readability checker of Semrush, to analyse and get feedback on your copy.

7) Have you used enough media in your article?

Compared to your competitors article, have you used enough images or other media in your article? If so, make sure you compress them and keep it under 100KB, or just as small as possible. Here’s a link to the tool I use to compress images (it’s free and super easy to use!)

8) Have you used bullet points/numbers where ever possible?

This might seem like something most marketers know, but a very few often practice. Generally writing in paragraphs makes the article look more informative, while in reality, its much easier to speak in bullet points or numbers to convey the message across whenever necessary.

9) Have you used short sentences and removed the bluff?

Lengthy paragraphs, fillers, overly exaggerative adjectives and meaningless bluff isn’t going to rank you on top nor get you a features snippet. Cut down everything that’s unnecessary and keep it straight to the point. Categorise and make it readable.

10) Are you using relevant CTAs?

Are you using including CTAs that are relevant to the readers awareness level and the search intent?

We all know that CTAs are important to drive traffic to any business, to convert or sign someone up for an email with gated content, whatever it maybe. But knowing where to place is even more important.

11) Add the content section to the top of your page

This again links to readability and the power we hand over to the users to skim through our content. This makes the user journey so much easier because article to know a certain something. And to make it clear, a content section just happens to work.

12) Don’t foget alt text

Is your Alt text game good? does it match the image perfectly? Make sure to concisely but creatively explain what the image represents.

13) Can you make your meta title more compelling to click?

Always work on your creative copy. This doesn’t mean what’s inside the poster, but rather what people see first — the meta title an the description. Don’t work around shortcuts and truly give it your best to include the primary keywords and a creative heading, while not forgetting to keep the character limit in check.

14) Have you over-optimised your keyword by using it more than once in your headlines?

Keyword stuffing (a big no-no) or in professional terms its known as Keyword density. Keyword density is a metric that tells us how frequently a keyword is used within a piece of content in relation to the overall word count.

However, the sad part is that it isn’t going to help you to rank. In fact, it’s more likely to have the opposite effect.

This is because Google sees artificially adding keywords to a page / “Keyword stuffing”— as an attempt to manipulate the algorithm at the expense of user experience. And as we know, Google’s all about the user experience.

In fact, keyword stuffing goes directly against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Hence, this is a black-hat SEO tactic, which is no longer a viable option.

Instead, what most marketers should do is trying long-tail keyword variations.

15) Have you included the topic (to tie it back) in the conclusion or the last section?

Your conclusion plays a huge role. Consider referring back to the original reason why you’re writing the article, the main topic and how you have broken the article down into sections. Giving a normal recap won’t really help.

After you’re done optimizing,

• Update the date published
• Publish the changes
• Re-vist every 4–8 weeks to see the performance

Wrapping up

So we looked at a few keyways to repurpose and optimize your marketing content with the help of SEO. Some of the focus areas that you need to absolutely nail is when writing headings, meta titles and images. Apart from that, make sure to;

• Structure your content better with SEO
• Use relevant CTAs
• Add a content section on the top of your article
• Be concise and direct (aim to provide value through quality and not quantity)
• Use compressed media (by the time your image loads, your visitor has already bounced)

And you don’t need every AI tool and the keyword research tool in the world. Having more than 5–8 tools will likely make you feel overwhelmed, but if you’re someone who thrives with more tools and technologies, don’t let hearing this change you.

Finally, stay consistent and be patient. Results won’t come over night, so make sure to celebrate smaller victories over the course of 6 months to 1 year! Good things take time!

Build a Content Strategy that Converts

Circuit is a strategic growth company founded by the team behind In Plain English — a tech media company that we created and grew from 0 to 4 million monthly views.

If you want to build a better content strategy, scale content operations, increase product awareness and adoption, and grow a community, we can make all of this happen.

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