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As this afternoon I’ll give an SEO training to one of my client’s content team, I wanted to share with you a specific scenario I’m including and making emphasis for: Content Reusage.

In the past I’ve written and shared about Content and SEO:

• A few weeks ago in this “SEO & Content” presentation with the American Marketing Association online event.
• In this Calq Webinar from a few weeks ago about identifying content opportunities that will connect with your audience.
• And from longer ago, my BrightonSEO presentation about Content Curation
• Or post about identifying content ideas for your blog posts at Moz.

The usual process and steps are that you analyze the current successful content (the one that has converted better, attracted more visibility and traffic, got more links and shares, etc.) from your own properties, your competitors and overall industry -that you can expand by analyzing your own industry in other countries or similar industries-, and find potential related or similar topics that you can use to better connect with your audience by fulfilling their questions and interests around your area, business, product or service.

The usual “challenge”, especially in mature, competitive industries comes when you identify that most of the topics you would like to write about have been already covered not only once, but many times with different types of articles, guides, posts, Webinars, videos, etc. in different ways, not only by your competitors, but also yourself in the past.

What criteria do you use and process you follow to identify if there are still opportunities to provide value to your online audience by writing about a topic that has been already covered?

Here’s a workflow I’ve created to identify the best option to target the topic again, reusing the content:

You can download the the graph in better quality from here. I’ve already followed this approach in a few opportunities with the following results:

1. Updating Content

I published an SEO friendly CMS checklist, Initially in 2012 and did a new version last year with a 2015 Edition, results were not bad at all:

2. Expanding Content

A few years ago I did a presentation at MozCon about SEO Project Management that I followed up to with a test to verify what people had learned from it.

3. Reformatting Content

There was an insightful How to Post from Himanshu about how to calculate SEO ROI based on which I created a Calculator (giving the relevant references of course). Something similar with the hreflang generator tool based on the specifications provided by Google.

Both of them are some of the most important landing pages of my site, especially the hreflang generator:

4. Curating Content

I’ve curated content quite a few times:

• I created a site called Why my Web Traffic Dropped with a list of criteria to check when you lose traffic in order to identify the cause
• The Marketer Toolbox (which is an expansion of All SEO Software) gathering online marketing tools
• All SEO guidelines with direct accesses to official SEO guidelines of search engines
• I created a checklist with SEO criteria to take into consideration to do a successful Web migration
• And an International SEO checklist with the fundamental steps to take

As you can see, content doesn’t need to be about a completely new topic in order to be successful and connect with your audience in a relevant and meaningful way that provides value.

Do you have any additional use cases, examples or alternatives for content reusage? Let me know in the comments!