by Nycole Walsh
Do you feel something creeping up behind you? An ancient presence that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention? Don’t panic – it’s just zombie content!
Zombie content, or assets lurking on your website but no longer serving their intended purpose, can still be valuable to your brand even years after initial creation. Your team puts an incredible amount of work into creating each piece of content housed under your brand umbrella. Drafting a blog post like this one takes a lot of hours, research, and energy – why let all that hard work go to waste?
You can make the most out of the time you’ve invested in content creation by identifying opportunities to revitalize existing pieces. The challenge lies in identifying creative ways to breathe new life into old collateral. Let’s explore a few strategies for doing so.
Identify zombie content with an audit
Unlike the mindless baddies in The Walking Dead, zombie content isn’t going to seek you out on its own. It’s your responsibility to track it down and bring it up to date, which you can accomplish by performing regular content audits.
A content audit is a systematic review and analysis of the content housed on your website and other digital platforms. The process evaluates how content is delivering on its intended purpose, assessing factors like quality, SEO performance, and user engagement. A content audit also prioritizes the assets with the highest potential based on existing search traffic, keyword relevance, and engagement patterns. This can be extremely helpful in making the audit process actionable from the get-go.
Here are five steps for initiating a content audit:
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- Define your goals: What do you want to achieve with this audit? Are you hoping to improve SEO? Update old materials with your latest messaging? Set clear goals so you know what to prioritize.
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- Inventory existing content: Gather every asset that lives onsite, including blog posts; landing pages; eBooks; videos; even your website’s “About Us” page.
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- Assess content performance: Use an analytics tool to evaluate metrics like page views, conversions, and bounce rates. Single out the pieces of content that aren’t performing up to your expectations.
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- Analyze content quality and relevance: Does each piece of content contain up-to-date messaging? Do the links included in the copy still work? Is it aligned with the latest iteration of your brand voice? Is it still relevant to the evolving needs of your audience?
- Develop an action plan: Create recommendations for each piece of content. Some assets may need to be updated, while others may be fine as-is. Determine who on your team will own each part of the process and have a clear timeline in place for when the refresh needs to be completed.
The frequency of content audits will vary from business to business. If you’re constantly churning out new content, you’ll likely need to perform them more regularly. A content audit should also be an integral part of any brand overhauls or changes in messaging. You’ll want to perform them at a regular cadence that makes sense for your brand, but every business should strive to complete an audit at least once a year.
The zombie content surfaced by your audit may be outdated in some way. Maybe it contains old SEO tags, or it’s no longer reflective of current branding. Underutilized assets are also ripe for renewed attention. These pieces won’t necessarily be outdated – instead, they might be high quality pieces that got buried or overshadowed by other news. Perhaps you have a lengthy testimonial video on your site that could be used as promotional material in a new campaign, or an old eBook that could benefit from refreshed statistics.
Breathing new life into old content
Now that you’ve spotted your zombies, it’s time to bring them back to life! Here are some tactics to consider, depending on the content in question:
Embrace channel saturation. There’s a common misconception that every member of your audience sees every single piece of content that you share. This perception makes us hesitant to repeat ourselves on various content channels, but the fact remains that we think everybody is paying more attention to our brand than they actually are. Every piece of content you release will only reach a segment of your audience, because different demographics interact with your brand in different ways. Your LinkedIn followers won’t be the same as your email newsletter recipients, who won’t be the same as prospects who stumbled onto your site from a search engine.
Everyone has different content formats and channels that they prefer. It’s our job to make sure we’re reaching our audience anywhere and everywhere they connect with our brand. Channel saturation encourages us to beat a constant drum across every single platform to ensure people associate our business with our messaging no matter where they find us. The more channels you release content into, the better the chances of reaching a larger segment of your audience. Beyond demographic differences, specific channels might serve unique purposes in the customer journey (e.g. LinkedIn for awareness, email for deeper engagement, whitepapers for prospects in the middle of the sales funnel).
If you’ve completed a research report, for example, you probably have an eBook onsite detailing the findings. But that eBook needs an interactive webpage. You can create infographics to share on social media. You could host a LinkedIn Live unpacking the findings. Turn different trends revealed by the report into a series of blog posts. Basically, anywhere you can share the content, you should be sharing it. Just make sure you’re customizing the content for each channel you plan to activate on.
Refresh evergreen content with new data. Since the early days of the pandemic, many of us have settled into hybrid work. There was no shortage of think pieces authored back in 2020 about the benefits of a dispersed workforce – your brand probably has a long lost blog post somewhere riddled with phrases like “unprecedented times” and “the new normal.”
But hybrid work has evolved significantly since then! New technologies have emerged to help us stay connected. New productivity data has been released. Business leaders and employees alike have changed the way we approach our daily responsibilities over the past four years, which means we have much more perspective to add to the conversation than we did back then. Ask yourself, how can we update that long lost post for today’s audience?
Create follow-up content. Keeping with our hybrid work example, another strategy for building on old content is creating follow-up pieces. The only thing more interesting than original data is year-over-year data: how have trends changed over time? Can we do a retrospective post on how employee sentiment around hybrid work has changed since 2020?
Follow-up content helps you craft a story that transcends a singular blog post. It helps you create a narrative that keeps your audience engaged as time passes, and establishes your brand as a consistent thought leader in the areas they care most about.
Invest in SEO strategy. Search engines like Google favor content that’s updated more frequently. That means bringing older content up to date can improve your search rankings. The tags, meta descriptions, and alt text you’ve used in the past can become outdated very quickly – use your content audits as an opportunity to refresh obsolete keywords or risk being left behind by the competition.
You’ll also want to regularly evaluate your internal linking strategy. Make sure you’re prioritizing links to high-value pages that drive conversions, like product descriptions or popular blog posts. Using descriptive anchor text for internal links will also help search engines understand the context of each of your pages to improve relevance for targeted keywords.
Reset, reframe, and revive
By looking at your strategy and evaluating every arm of it at a regular cadence (is that one sticking out of the ground?!), you can keep your content fresh and relevant in perpetuity. Zombie content might be frightening to encounter, but you don’t have to face it alone!
Contact Kickstand today for help initiating a content audit and/or bringing your zombies back to life.
