Refurbishing Top Content - Best of Whiteboard Friday

You've got top-performing content on your site that does really well. Maybe it's highly converting, maybe it garners the most qualified traffic — but it's just sitting there gathering dust. Isn't there something else you can do with content that's clearly proven its worth?

As it turns out, there is! In this ever-popular episode of Whiteboard Friday, Moz's Senior SEO Scientist, Britney Muller, shares three easy steps for identifying, repurposing, and republishing your top content to juice every drop of goodness out of it.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Britney Muller, Moz's SEO and Content Architect, and I'm so excited to talk to you today about refurbishing your top content. Any of you watching likely have top content, either on your site or a client's site, that does really, really well. Whether that's getting the most traffic or converting the most users, it does really well. The problem is that we let it just sit there, and we're not getting the amplification that we could out of that content. So I'm going to talk to you today about how to sort of funnel in more qualified leads. So how do we do that?

Step 1: Identify your site's top traffic pages.

Analytics is so great for this and to further evaluate which of those pages are converting the highest, have the most engagements, and are bringing in most of your traffic.

It's super important to keep in mind that there are other forms of content. It's not always necessarily just a page on your website. It could be a video somewhere, it could be a really great podcast, it could even be a printout, and I've run into this a few times where the information isn't currently digital, but they use it in a clinic or in an office setting that could do really great things for the website. So keep that in mind.

Step 2: Simplify and repurpose

For the sake of our example, I'm going with a long-form content of how to choose the right college. Maybe this brings in lots of applicants for a particular school or university. So what could they better be doing with this piece of content? So that brings us to step two, which is simplify and repurpose. We all want to consume information differently. There are different use cases, you name it. So to take a long-form piece of content and to put it together in a PowerPoint, really simplify it and break it up into slides. From there, you can use those slides or take new raw footage to make a really, really powerful video on how to choose the right college.

If you have these two steps done, you're kind of set up for success for images. You could either take images from your PowerPoint or your video and have really great informational text below it.

Lastly, audio, how easy would it be to take this long-form piece and to make it into an audio option or a podcast even, allowing your visitors maybe another option when they get to this page? So it's fun to experiment with that as well.

You can interweave some of these other forms of content back into the original piece, and now you're learning a lot more about your audience and a lot more about how they want to consume your content.

Step 3: Publish on popular platforms

I can already feel people getting really squeamish about this, but you shouldn't. Let me say there are two big reasons why you should be taking advantage of this. One, these are all really, really powerful sites. They rank really well. Two, they have a huge audience, and their audiences are actively seeking information that you're providing on your site. So if you're not going to be providing expertise and information on these sites, someone will, right? So you want to take advantage of that, and you want to take the opportunity.

So you could take your PowerPoint and upload it to SlideShare. SlideShare ranks so, so well. You could take your video and upload it to YouTube, with the caveat of putting it on Vimeo or Wistia first. You want to make sure that you are self-hosting for up to three months, and then you can transfer your video to YouTube. That way you're getting the authority of that video, and Youtube.com isn't ranking first for it.

Instagram is great for those images, but, again, I would always put the text below it and keep your images really clean and not have too much text on them, and then to obviously hashtag appropriately.

Then Pinterest, Quora, people are actively asking questions that you have all the answers to, so to be the expertise in the field and to take advantage of people asking, "How do I choose the right college?" Reddit and LinkedIn are other options to further amplify.

Step 4: Measure the referral metrics

Measure the impact of republishing on these sites. There are a couple of ways to do this. These are some of my favorite engagement metrics. So you have number of viewed pages, you have time on site, bounce rate is always good to look at, and, obviously, conversions. So this really starts to paint a picture of: Where are you seeing the qualified leads? Where is your qualified traffic coming from?

Then the next time you go to a new content strategy, maybe you leave out these three because you didn't get much traffic from them, but maybe you saw a bunch of qualified leads from SlideShare. So that brings you to pivot, like the "Friends" episode. It allows you to pivot.

So now, we have a strategy moving forward. We know what platforms work best for your website or your business, and you're kind of setting yourself up for success down the road.

I would love, love, love to hear if you have experimented with these strategies, what has worked for you, what hasn't. Also feel free to ask me any questions down below. Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I will see all again soon. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com