An AEC Marketers Guide: Recycling Blog Articles Saves Time and Raises SEO

Blog articles are a great way to share your expertise and attract new readers, but they’re often a lot of work. For those of you who have been at this awhile, you probably have a fairly robust archive of old posts and articles. While a good archiving system might mean they’re still getting read, a lot of them are probably gathering dust. Those two issues—new articles and dusty old articles—aren’t all that separate from each other. Recycling your blog articles is not only a great way to save time and resources, it helps keep your content fresh and improve your SEO.

Why recycle blog articles?

The big reason is that it makes sense, and here is why:

• Saving time: Writing new blog articles from scratch can be time-consuming. Recycling old articles can help you save time so you can focus on other content marketing tasks.
  
  
• Reaching a new audience: If you've already published an article that's been successful, you can recycle it to reach a new audience. For example, you could republish the article on social media, in an email newsletter, or as a guest post on another blog.
  
  
• Improving SEO: When you republish an article, you're essentially giving it a new lease on life. This means that it will have the opportunity to rank for new keywords and attract new traffic to your website.

How to recycle blog articles

“Recycling articles” doesn’t mean simply re-publishing them. In fact, we don’t recommend that. Here are ways you can refresh old articles for your use:

• Make sure the content is still relevant. If your article is several years old, it may not be as relevant to your audience as it once was.
  
  
• Update the content. We know from the SEO Periodic Table that keeping your content fresh is critical to SEO performance. Update all the content to reflect the latest information. Pay attention to statistics or data, which have likely changed. Include case studies or research when possible.
  
  
• Change the format. You can also recycle your blog articles by changing the format. For example, you could turn an article into an infographic, a video, or a podcast.
  
  
• Optimize for SEO. Include relevant keywords in the title, meta description, and throughout the article. You should also update the article's URL and make sure to link to it from other pages on your website.
  
  
• Repurpose the content. You can also repurpose your blog articles by using them in other marketing materials. For example, you could use an article as the basis for an email newsletter, a white paper, or a sales presentation.

Using AI to help you repurpose AEC blog articles

There is another option open to you, if you want to leverage AI as a tool. There are a number of AIs well-suited to repurposing blog articles. These tools can help you summarize, identify key phrases, and generate new content ideas.

Automata is a content repurposing tool that uses machine learning to analyze your old content and suggest new titles, generate writing prompts, and identify relevant topics, keywords, and phrases. It can also convert your content into different formats, such as infographics, presentations, and videos.

QuillBot is a paraphrasing tool that can rewrite your old content in different words. This is useful for repurposing blog posts for social media, as you can use QuillBot to create shorter, more concise versions of your content.

Automata is a video repurposing tool that can break down long-form videos into short, shareable snippets. It also uses machine learning to identify the most important parts of your video, so you can be sure that the snippets you create are relevant and engaging.

ChatGPT (the old standby!) can be used to generate new content from old content. It can be used to create new blog posts, social media posts.

Recycling blog articles is a great way to save time, reach a new audience, and improve your SEO. By following the tips in this article, you can easily recycle your old articles and get the most out of your content marketing efforts.