The SEO Cape Town Guide To Repurposing Content:
We know that creating high quality, original content is not as easy as it seems, so why not get as much out of what you have already covered as you can? In The SEO Cape Town Guide, we will teach you the art of recycling content, giving you more “bang for your buck” to ensure you’re always getting the most out of your hard work. Content is everything in SEO.
What is Repurposing Content according to the SEO Cape Town Guide?
Repurposing content is basically another way to say recycling content for SEO purposes. It is the practice of taking existing content and reformulating it to work for different formats or platforms than what it was originally created for.
Doing this successfully increases your content output while also reaching new audiences. An example of content repurposing would be taking a YouTube video and turning it into a blog post. With some content you can even do this multiple times, by then taking that blog post and further repurposing it into a newsletter or LinkedIn post. Depending on your content piece, the repurposing possibilities can be endless!
The Value of Repurposing Content
How do you reuse your content in different ways?
Here are three important advantages from The SEO Cape Town Guide on how you can reuse your content in different ways, that is not only efficient and economical, but more specifically it can:
– Grow Reach: By expanding your content’s lifespan, your reach increases as your content is able to connect with new audiences as it works across different platforms.
– Grow Engagement: By adapting SEO content to fit multiple different platforms, it allows for increased engagement with your audience as a result.
– Save money and Increase Production: Instead of spending resources on creating new pieces of content from scratch each time, repurposing your content allows you to create multiple pieces of content for multiple platform distributions using only one original content piece.
According to Semrush’s State of Content Report of 2023, at least 42% of marketers and business owners report that effectively updating and repurposing content results in content marketing success.
The SEO Cape Town Guide provides essential information on how to apply these strategies effectively, to ensure optimal success!
Let’s get started!
How to Effectively Repurpose Content
Make no mistake, for all the benefits repurposing content marketing has, it is not as simple as copying and pasting from one platform to another. Each platform and content format has its own nuances and considerations that must be taken into account.
The SEO Cape Town Guide provides a framework that will help you strategically repurpose your content.
1. Identify Opportunities for Content Recycling
A great place to start is to look at your top performing, evergreen content. This is always the best for repurposing as this content has already proven to be of interest to your audience and typically boasts a longer shelf life.
In order to find your high-performing content, make use of analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Simply navigate to the left-hand menu and select “Reports”.
From there, follow the path “Life cycle” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens.” Once successfully in “Pages and Screens”, you can now see all metrics for every page currently on your website.
If you have a larger website with many pages, you can further narrow this down by going to the search bar and locating the folder your content is located in by typing in yourwebsite.com/blog or guides located at yourwebsite.com/guide respectively.
Once you have located the page your content is sitting on, have a look at the number of views to identify what pieces are the most popular. Don’t forget to also note the average engagement time, as this tells you what content users are spending the longest time engaging with.
“Evergreen” content refers to content that is suitable all year round, making it the most valuable. Record which pages contain evergreen versus more seasonal types of content. Seasonal content can still be repurposed and can even draw higher engagement during special holidays like Christmas.
The SEO Cape Town Guide suggests that your content planning should include evergreen as well as seasonal content for repurposing, to have all of your bases covered.
2. Selecting the Correct Platform and Format according to the SEO Cape Town Guide
In order to repurpose your content to its fullest potential, you must ensure the right platform and format is being used. The SEO Cape Town Guide provides valuable insight and practical guidance on selecting the right platform and format to maximize the impact of your content.
Your choice should be in line with the original content pieces’ core message. However, it should be translated in a way that resonates with a different audience.
Look into what types of content perform the best for you, select your top performers, and then stick to these formats when repurposing.
As you review your top performing pieces using any analytics tool, try to identify any patterns that might jump out. For example, if your content utilising guides and list formats consistently performs better, add those content formats to the list to use when repurposing.
The second important factor to consider is the platform itself. As discussed earlier, each platform will have its own unique audience and formats that are most suitable. For example, video content is ideal for social media platforms such as TikTok, however this does not work for email marketing and newsletters.
That being said, The SEO Cape Town Guide lists a few common repurposing ideas for consideration:
– Data-rich blog posts or statistical content work well as graphic infographics
– Webinars can be used for a blog post that recaps key takeaways and highlights
– “How-to” blog posts are easy to create video tutorials around
– Detailed guides and blog posts can be dissected in a podcast episode
– A series of related blog posts can be compiled into a comprehensive ebook
– Educational blog posts can drive engagement as a series of quiz questions or social media polls
– Video or written interviews can be used as bite-sized content pieces for things like social posts containing quotes or succinct key takeaways
3. Who is your Target Audience?
Having clearly defined target audiences for each piece of (repurposed) content ensures your “new” content pieces will appeal to the correct people.
When doing this, don’t worry if the goals for the recycled content pieces differ from the original source.
For example, an original piece of content that was designed to raise brand awareness via organic search to begin with can be reworked into something that instead prioritises social media engagement.
This is the beauty of repurposing content; if done correctly, it can hit multiple different KPI’s (key performance indicators) within your content marketing strategy.
4. How to Optimise Repurposed Content for Selected Format and Platform
The SEO Cape Town Guide has now provided you with the tools that you need to correctly select and repurpose your chosen content. It’s time to optimise your “new” piece for the specifics of the platform to better ensure its chances of performing well!
You can start by employing different on-page SEO techniques that align with the repurposed content format. For example, when repurposing anything into a blog post, you can utilise practices relating to keyword research to increase its probability of ranking highly on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
This process will differ from format to format and platform to platform – like a high-performance blog post being turned into an email campaign will need to instead consider email etiquette and how people typically read an email. Here you would focus less on relevant keywords but rather on creating attention-grabbing subject lines, engaging body copy, and including calls to action (CTA) to be successful.
Similarly, when reworking content for social media purposes, you will want to leverage hashtags for more visibility.
But just as different content formats require different adjustments, so do social media platforms. The language you might use on Instagram will not perform as well on LinkedIn. This is because Instagram is more casual and organic, while LinkedIn is more formal and professional. Therefore, make sure to tweak your tone and language from platform to platform for the best results.
This idea also extends to multimedia used in the content you are wanting to repurpose. If you are wanting to cut up your hour-long YouTube video to create a bunch of short Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, best practice is to go from a horizontal to vertical aspect ratio.
5. Common Content Repurposing Examples
Although the way in which you repurpose your content depends on the content you have already created or will create, The SEO Cape Town Guide provides a few common examples to give you some inspiration if you’re still feeling a bit stuck:
Adjusting and Publishing Existing Blog Posts to Other Websites
Extend your contents lifespan and increase your reach by adapting your content to fit a few external websites or blogs that align with your products or business.
The two most common ways to do this is securing writing guest posts and posting on LinkedIn or Medium. However, there are distinct differences between the two options.
Writing a guest post with the goal of repurposing means you are essentially creating a new, fresh piece of content that takes inspiration from the original content source taking care to adjust the tone, language and style to fit the hosts audience and their preferences. Be care ful of content duplication which is a big no-no according to the SEO Cape Town Guide.
But when it comes to websites like LinkedIn, simply reshaping the original content piece to make it more engaging for social should work fine – perhaps this could include throwing in a few questions to get your audience thinking and therefore prompting them to comment and engage with the post further.
Create Multiple Content Pieces from Webinar Recordings
Webinars are typically very educational and packed with valuable insights, quotes, and statistics. This makes them ideal candidates for repurposing into a multitude of formats, including social media and articles/blog posts.
Try consolidating the information from the Webinar into a couple of themes and create a series of blog posts/articles around them. Alternatively, you could also create engaging graphics out of quotes and statistics to turn into an Instagram carousel for social media.
Making Written Content Visual
Lengthier content like ebooks and essays can feel daunting to repurpose, however, narrowing this long-form content down into core themes can make for a great infographic. Infographics are an excellent way to relay the same information in an attractive and engaging way.
Infographics work especially well on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and even Instagram, as they are able to relay data in a visual format that is more easily digestible and quicker to consume for your audience.
You can also help any kind of visual content you utilise to rank better in Google by adding proper alt text. Alt text is the written description of whatever visual you use that is read aloud by screen readers and displayed when images fail to load. Although this may seem small, it can in fact give your SEO efforts a boost.
Transforming Articles into Videos
If you have a well written, original piece of content, why not turn it into a visually engaging video?
The SEO Cape Town Guide suggests utilising AI tools such as AI Social Content Generator and AI Video Marketing Automator. You can directly convert your articles/blog posts into more easily accessible video content with just a few clicks.
6. Tracking and Monitoring Success
Once you have a few “new” pieces of repurposed content complete and out in the world, an important part of the process involves being able to measure how successfully this repurposed content is performing.
Going back to your KPI’s specific to each piece of repurposed content and its relative platform, use them to compare similar content types to your work.
The main ones you will want to take careful note of are:
– Website traffic (the number of views and users your page/content has received)
– Engagement metrics (the engagement rate, shares, comments, likes and saves)
– Conversion metrics (conversion rate and total conversions)
– SEO metrics (like organic traffic and keyword rankings on SERPs)
This is where analytics tools become very helpful once again. There are a variety of paid and free options across the web, but social analytics are often already built-in to social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.
For example, if you have decided to repurpose a blog post into a LinkedIn guide, you can track its performance through a LinkedIn report. This report is divided into three sections pertaining to “Audience,” “Engagement,” and “Posts” that all provide you with helpful and relevant information on your profile. Navigate to “Posts”, and you will be able to view the impressions, clicks, comments, and more for any post you have created.
In Conclusion
By exercising some creativity and consulting the right tools, repurposing content can be a huge time as well as money saver for your business, not to mention taking your content marketing to new-found successes. By following the insightful guidance in The SEO Cape Town Guide, you won’t only reduce resources while increasing production, but also reap the benefits of connecting with new audiences and driving sales across multiple platforms.