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    We have written many times about the important role content plays in the SEO process. Creating good quality, substantive content that responds to user intent is a key component of a content strategy. What about the content that’s already on your site? Is it worth updating them and how do you go about it?”

    recycle-content

    What is content recycling?

    Content recycling is simply the reuse of content. However, this does not involve duplicating existing content and publishing the same content once again, but rather refreshing it. 

    Considering Google’s criteria for determining the position of pages in the search engine, adding identical content one more time would not work. On the contrary. The phenomenon of duplication internal negatively affects the evaluation of a page by Google’s robots and causes its position in the search engine to drop. It is worth keeping this in mind when planning to recycle content. 

    However, if you have a lot of content on your site and are running out of ideas for further blog development, you can confidently use your existing content by updating it or presenting it in a different form. 

    Depending on what subject matter the content on your site is about, you can choose appropriate ways to recycle. If you run a site with so-called evergreen content, i.e. content that is up-to-date regardless of the passage of time, it will certainly be easier for you to take advantage of recycling than on sites with news and current information. 

    The following is a good example of this.

    Ways to recycle content

    Web developers have already tried many ways to recycle content. What kind of content can be recycled and how can you do it?”

    Updating and expanding an existing article

    Any text, regardless of the topic, you can expand with new information. Updating the content with the latest facts, findings, information about new trends on a given topic or discussing an issue from a different perspective are just a few examples of how you can change the text on your site.

    When recycling content, don’t forget to optimize it properly for SEO. When updating an article, remember to create qualitative and substantively correct content. Also structure your headlines and saturate the text with the right number of keywords relevant to your topic. 

    Topic cycles 

    If you run a blog and post thematically related articles, you can update the content in a way that makes it easy to  combine them into one cycle. 

    Information about a newly created collection of articles on a topic of interest to your audience will spur them to revisit your content pages. 

    Change content format

    As time passes, web developers are offering more and more forms of content presentation. You can boldly take advantage of this and breathe new life into an article that was written a long time ago and its content is still relevant. 

    Presenting content in a more user-friendly way is sure to grab their attention and make them read the topic again. You can do this by recording a short video or podcast, to which you add an update and expand the content with keywords. 

    Webinars are also a very popular form of communicating information. Organizing such a meeting, the scenario of which you will create using existing content on your site, will allow you to draw attention to it and attract new audiences. Webinars are also often supplemented with surveys or user sign-ups for newsletters, in which you can also include content you have already created.

    There is a bit more work involved in creating an e-book. It certainly needs to contain more content, but you can also use the content you already have in it. An e-book is a great opportunity to expand your audience and get them interested in the content you create. 

    How to select content for recycling?

    Regularly published content is hundreds of thousands of characters on our blog. Articles are written on a variety of topics and some have larger audiences and some have smaller audiences. So how to choose content that is worth recycling? 

    Use tools and reports on the most popular pages of your website. You can check them, for example, in Google Search Console or in Google Analytics in the site content report. 

    Also consider the potential of the text in question. Analyze what type of content recycling will be most profitable for that content, and whether you can further saturate it with keywords. 

    You can also do a deeper analysis and take into account users, their demographics and geographic data to best select content that will interest your target audience.

    Does content recycling pay off?

    Regular content development on the site is not an easy task. Even the most creative specialists sometimes run out of ideas for new articles. We can, of course, support ourselves with new solutions, such as AI Copywriting, but this does not always fully solve our problem. Often the topics are already exhausted and it is difficult to find new issues that can be discussed in the next text. 

    If you find yourself at just such a point, content recycling is an excellent solution.

    By using the ways discussed above, you can

    • enrich your site with new formats for presenting information, which will increase the readability and attractiveness of the content,
    • update information on a given topic, which is also important from the point of view of search engine robots,
    • get new users by creating new topic sets,
    • saturate recycled content with keywords and improve page optimization for SEO,
    • save the time needed for research related to finding new topics.

    If you need help with content recycling and want to get the most out of your articles SEO Agency will certainly be a good support. At Up&More we will help you create a good content strategy and together we will find the best way for you to recycle your content.

    Let's talk!

    Karolina Jastrzebska
    Karolina Jastrzebska

    The author of the post is Karolina Jastrzebska. She started her adventure with SEO in 2021. She currently works as an SEO Specialist at Up More.