One of the easiest ways to get content for your social media channels when you’re planning your content calendar is by pulling ideas from your website, specifically your blog.
But what if your blogs are outdated? Well, rewrite them!
When you’re strategically planning for the next few months of Facebook and Instagram posts or YouTube videos, you should also take the time to review the blogs on your website. If you’re missing Evergreen Content and your other blog posts are from a few years ago, you might want to get to updating!
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content would be the information you’ve posted to your website that will still be valid years from now. It’s the blog posts that when they show up on search engines and they were written in 2016, they still hold value and meaning to the reader. You’ll still want to scan this content though, to be sure links, images and anything else you’ve thrown in there aren’t outdated. You may want to work with your web developer or SEO company to determine the type of traffic you’re getting to this evergreen content. There may be technical tweaks that could be done to quickly boost this content to the top of search pages for the keywords you’re targeting. If it’s really good content, you want people to see it, right?!
Once you’ve determined that your “yep, still good” blogs have passed the test of time, work them into your social marketing strategy. Add one or two to your content calendar each month to fill in the blanks.
What should I do with outdated content?
Outdated content can be a bit more challenging to update. But it needs to be done. Here are a few steps to take to get that content refreshed:
- Determine which articles are no longer working for your site.
- Determine why they are no longer working: is it content that is no longer valid, is it broken links that need to be corrected, is it a page on your sit that is longer working, etc.
- Fix broken links quickly and easily.
- Rewrite your content. If “some” of the current article is still good, you could write a new blog updating the older part and just link to it within your site with a small update to the older blog. If most of the article is outdated, write a new one but just replace the content on the older webpage with notes of when it was last updated. The goal is to not compete against yourself for those particular keywords while keeping people clicking through your site for as long as possible.
- Update images and graphics to be current. Sometimes you just need a better-quality photo.
- Work with your website company to be sure the page is optimized for SEO purposes: good titles, good keywords, alt- text, etc.
Once you get these blogs updated, schedule them into your upcoming social posts as well. It could be a simple post like: We’ve updated our tips about…
This process creates a cycle that improves your web content, your search results and your social reach.
