What's the best way to repurpose content?

Refresh. Redirect. Repurpose.

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If you haven't done a content audit of your publicly facing website content in the last 12 months, you are due. It's the number one way to discover lots of ways to repurpose content, and repurposing is the number one way to cut back on content creation costs while optimizing your site for visitors and search engines (SEO).

Here's how to get started repurposing content:

1. Start with a content inventory. An inventory simply lists and makes you aware of all the content that you have available for people to find. Here's one way to check: type "site:www.yoursite.com" without the quotes into Google on a cache-free browser. This searches only your site. How many pages show up? What's first? What's buried? How could it be better?
2. Earmark outdated content. Outdated content is stuff that your audience must wade through to find the good stuff. Refresh it so it's valuable again, turn it into something else, or get rid of it entirely by redirecting it to a more relevant page.
3. Check your content-purpose-to-business-strategy ratio. In other words, if your main objective is to attract new customers and 90% of your content speaks to existing customers, your site is imbalanced. Consider ways to repurpose the current customer content for new customers.
4. Highlight all the best of the best content in your inventory. Look for themes or popular content that can be combined in new and useful ways for your audience. Five articles within the same theme might become one "Top 5" article that links to the others.
5. Create a "repurposing" best practice for all new content creation. When you consider multiple ways you can leverage a single article or video or photoshoot before you do the work, the overall effort to create multiple things from one idea becomes smaller.

Saturate Your Site with Value

When you start with a content inventory of full-on content audit, not only will you find ways to repurpose what you have in valuable ways, you will discover weak or no-longer-on-target content.

Imagine a 1000 page site that is 50% not-so-valuable, such as old events, inactive programs, PDFs with old branding, and advice that is no longer useful. If you can take those 500 pages and archive them, combine them, delete them and redirect the URLs, you might end up with 500 useful pages and 250 new and refreshed pages. 750 pages at 100% value is much better than 50% blech.

Now Google will see and serve up only content-rich pages and your audience will only see valuable content. A much better user experience overall.

A content audit helps you repurpose content and empower your audience to find what they need and help themselves. Schedule one at the beginning of every new year. A content strategist can help.

‍More on this subject:

Content audit and content inventory: what's the difference?
What are the benefits of a content audit?

Photo of windmills in California on the way to Arizona by Shelly Bowen, founder of Pybop.