by TNS Experts
When you write content, you want it to be read by your audience so that you can make the most out of it. After all, the main goal of content marketing is to attract your target audience and customers.
While creating great content is essential to get your website in front of your audience, it’s not enough to do just that. You need to distribute your content well too.
And that’s not all. You also need to keep it updated and optimized to ensure that it climbs up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This process is called re-optimization.
So, how can you go about re-optimization?
Let’s find out.
Steps to Re-Optimize Your Content
Here are the steps involved in re-optimizing your content.
Table of Contents
Find Content That’s Performing Well
Analyze the Content
Sort for Relevance
Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Rewrite the Content
Reindex in Google
Track Your Progress
1. Find Content That’s Performing Well
When you’re re-optimizing your content, you’re essentially improving its quality so that it can rank better. Hence, naturally, you need to find content that is already performing well so that you can improve its performance even further.
Content that ranks on the second page of the SERPs or low on the first page is the best suited for this. This is content that’s already driving some traffic to your website and by optimizing it, you’ll be able to get even more traffic out of it.
It’s only after you’ve re-optimized this content that you should move to content that’s ranking further down.
2. Analyze the Content
Before you can re-optimize your content, you need to figure out where you stand first. Check which keywords your content ranks for.
Once you’ve found the keywords, you should do keyword research and check their volume. This is essential because you don’t want to end up re-optimizing posts that don’t bring in much website traffic.
What’s more, you ask?
You should consider the keyword difficulty as well. Try finding those keywords where you have a good search volume but low difficulty. This can make it easier for you to rank higher for those keywords after re-optimization.
Higher keyword difficulty would mean that you’d need to put in a lot of effort to improve your rankings.
When you’re analyzing your content, you should also check your current keyword density to figure out if it’s currently optimized for keywords or not. Such analysis can also help you find out if you’ve over-optimized for any keyword.
3. Sort for Relevance
After you’ve refined the list of keywords based on their difficulty and volume, you’ll be left with a bunch of them. Next, you need to figure out which ones are relevant to your business.
You need to find out if it’s worth putting in the effort to rank for those keywords. It’s no good putting in the effort to re-optimize a piece of content that’s not going to yield any commercial value.
So, what should you do?
Identify the keywords that are the most important and relevant to your content. These are the keywords that you need to target. Make sure that the keywords you select have a good search volume and difficulty score.
4. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
Now that you’ve got all of your keywords ready, you need to start ideating and creating your content. For this, you need to keep in mind that if you optimize for a low-potential keyword, you might lose out on rankings for a better one.
So, you need to be very careful with the keywords you choose for re-optimization.
The last thing you’d want to do is to compete with yourself and lose your existing rankings.
What’s more, you ask?
You need to be careful about the keyword density as well. Don’t stuff the keywords in your content else it may look unnatural.
5. Rewrite the Content
The next step of re-optimizing your content is that of rewriting it. You need to make the content better suited for your audience and for this, you should consider diving deep into the topic.
If you offer better value through your content, it’ll be more likely to rank higher than it did previously.
To ensure that the content you write is top-notch, you can leverage tools. These will help you come up with stellar copy and provide suggestions for improvements too.
Once you’ve written the content, you should update your content in the content management system (CMS). However, do ensure that you keep your URL intact. If you change the URL, you might lose all the work that you’ve put in till now.
Lastly, update the publishing date. You want Google to know that you’ve re-optimized your content. This way, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of the freshness of the content.
6. Reindex in Google
Once you’ve published the content, you need to reindex it in Google. This can help you get indexed quickly without having to wait for the next natural crawl of your website.
So, how can you reindex it in Google?
For this, you can request indexing by going to Google Search Console and heading to the URL Inspection Tool. There, you can request reindexing.
7. Track Your Progress
The last step in re-optimization is that of monitoring your progress. You can track the page-level impressions in Google Search Console to figure out their search presence.
Also, you can track the keyword and see how well it’s climbing up in the SERPs. You should also check the search queries used to find the post. Doing so will help you understand which keywords you might be ranking for.
You could also look at the number of social shares the content is generating to figure out if it’s shareable or not.
Lastly, look at the traffic analytics of the post in Google Analytics and see if there’s an increase in traffic.
Final Thoughts
Content re-optimization is a very useful strategy to help you improve the effectiveness of your content. For it, you need to find content that’s performing well and analyze it. Find relevant keywords and make sure you avoid keyword cannibalization.
Next, rewrite your content and add it to your CMS and publish it. Change the publishing date and then reindex it on Google. Lastly, track the progress of your content to figure out how well it’s ranking.