If you stick to one formula for all your digital marketing, you’re likely overlooking some significant opportunities to speak directly to your ideal buyer on your website, social media posts, and email marketing. Establishing yourself as an industry expert takes more effort than publishing one blog post on a subject. It requires you to think outside the box and look for opportunities to leverage creativity.

As you build a library of content, you will eventually encounter a different challenge. Writer’s block will convince you that you don’t have anything new to say. While it’s unlikely you’ve written everything on one subject, your structured approach may be impeding creative ideas from flowing. Thankfully, there are some simple actions you can take that will increase your opportunities to rank in search.

1. Update Old Blog Posts

One overlooked digital marketing strategy starts with digging into your analytics to see which keywords your audience uses in search to find you.

• What are the keywords and keyword phrases you are ranking for organically?
• When searchers click the links, do they stay on your website or bounce off right away? (This indicates that your content isn’t meeting their expectations.)
• Do visitors explore additional pages on your website or stay with the one page?
• What are the top keywords that draw people to your Google My Business page?
• What are the hashtags that attract the most interaction on social media?

Once you confirm the keywords and keyword phrases your audience uses to find you organically in search, you can focus on the content to update first.

Strategies for Updating Old Blog Content

There are a few different strategies for updating old blog content. I suggest you try a few different ideas and compare the analytics to see which one helps improve website rankings for your targeted keywords.

On-Page Optimization

The first way you can update older blog content is by looking at your most popular posts and reviewing them for on-page SEO opportunities. One of the best ways to do this is by using a tool like the SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker. This tool will do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to analyzing your blog post, comparing the content to similar articles, and offering suggestions for improvement.

Update Blogs with Current Information

A second strategy for updating old blog content is to go to the earliest posts on your blog and read the content. Start by asking yourself if the blog article still aligns with your business philosophy, current offers, services, and products. If you find that the content no longer aligns with your business mission statement, take the necessary steps to unpublish it, and move on. This will include redirecting links to prevent 404 error codes.

If your blog post is still usable, your next action is to update the article.

• Review the content and see where you can add internal links to recently published content
• Update the external links to recently published content
• Update statistics to the current year
• Rewrite content to support the new information in the updated stats
• Adjust the wording in the headers to incorporate long-tail keywords
• Update images
• Add additional graphics or a video into the post if relevant
• Update the meta description
• Confirm you have used SEO best practices throughout the post

2. Add Infographics or Video

Some explanations will be clearer when you show rather than tell information. Even when you incorporate text into the blog post, your audience will likely view the video and skim your words. Video is becoming more popular with content marketers. HubSpot explains that in 2020 81% of businesses are using video as part of their marketing strategy, which is almost a 20% increase from the previous year.

Additional Video Statistics for 2020:

• 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television. (Google)
• YouTube is the second most popular website after Google. (Alexa)
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.

3. Add Schema Markup and Structured Data

One of the best things you can do to help your website rank in search is to make the context of your content as easy for Google search bots to identify as possible. Besides using SEO best practices by incorporating headers and bulleted lists, you can add schema markup and structured data.

Schema Markup: This is code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.

Structured data: Structured data refers to kinds of data with a high level of organization, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways.

After you’ve updated your blog content you now have new information to promote on social media and include in your email marketing communications.

If you’re facing writer’s block, don’t give up! Rather than trying to come up with a new blog article, look into your archives and see if you can incorporate one of the overlooked digital marketing strategies that add value we’ve highlighted today