There’s no doubt that content material advertising is one of the first-rate ways to attract and engage customers for manufacturers and companies.

A strong content material method can do wonders for your backside line.

Yet, a few manufacturers fall into the entice of churning out heaps of fresh content material at the fee of exceptional.

Producing new pieces isn’t the best alternative for smart content entrepreneurs.

You likely have stale – but exceptional – content material in your files, amassing virtual dirt. Don’t allow them to go to waste.

On September 19, I moderated a Best of SEJ Summit webinar supplied by Rhea Drysdale, CEO at Outspoken Media.

Drysdale shared how you could refresh present virtual content and salvage past funding for an extended-term payoff that benefits more than one marketing channel.

Here’s a recap of the webinar presentation.
Understanding Lost & Missed Content Opportunities
Lost content material is those pieces that used to perform nicely but now do not.

A neglected content possibility manner that your content material has the potential to perform higher than how it is faring today.

For businesses, addressing these needs requires handing over two answers to clients:

Content Audit: For lost content material opportunities.
Competitive Gap Analysis: For overlooked content material opportunities.

Both deliverables:

Provide numbers that get purchase-in.
Develop effective, long-term techniques.
Detail what wishes to show up subsequently.
What Is a Content Audit?
A content audit is a process of gathering and studying all your internet site content material, including key content material metrics.

A content audit aims to ensure all the data on your web page is accurate and up to date with your target market. However, to additionally send high-quality indicators to the engines like Google.

Learn more in Ashley Ward’s SEJ submission, How to Do a Content Audit: The Ultimate Checklist.

What Is a Competitive Gap Analysis?
In step with Drysdale, a gap evaluation evaluates your modern overall performance versus favored, or most beneficial, overall performance.

A competitive hole evaluation compares your overall performance to a described competitor set and metrics.

Learn more in Katy Katz’s SEJ, Here’s Why You Can’t Succeed Without a Content Gap Analysis.

The Issue of Forgotten Content

Forgotten content material collects digital dust, which leads to:

Traffic declines because of any of the following:

Lack of merchandising.
Reduced stocks & referral traffic.
Algorithmic updates.
Manual movements.
Lack of freshness.
Increased competition.
SERP modifications
Technical modifications.
Not mobile pleasant.
Not relaxed.
Technical debt because of:
Server errors & redirects (internal, outside, & inbound).
CMS upgrades.
Outdated plugins.
Redesigns.
New server / CDN.
Updated bureaucracy.
URL and area adjustments.
Outdated authorship.
Broken or unsupported assets (PDFs, Docs, SWF, iFrames, etc.).
Broken embeds like tweets, videos, or images.
Off-message content material due to:
No longer imparting a specific carrier, product, and so on.
New brand language.
New font, colorings, and design factors.
New brand or criminal pointers.
New guidelines and compliance requirements.
The off-message content material may be major trouble, not just for users but also for your search engine optimization overall performance. Some pages are held to a higher preferred consisting of Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages.

YMYL pages could probably impact the future happiness, fitness, monetary way, and protection of users.

This terminology appears in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, which identifies the most critical elements in page first-class score:

The Purpose of the Page.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT).
Main Content (MC) Quality and Amount.
Website Information/records about who’s accountable for the MC.
Website Reputation/Reputation: approximately who’s responsible for the MC.
For Google, excessive pleasant pages are people who have:

A very high stage of EAT.
A very pleasurable amount of excessive or maximum high-quality MC.
Very effective website recognition and recognition for the MC author (if one-of-a-kind from the web page).

While low-fine pages are people who:

Have an insufficient stage of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
The first class of the MC is low.
There is an unsatisfying quantity of MC for the motive of the page.
The name of the MC is exaggerated or surprising.
The ads or secondary content (SC) distract from the MC.
There is an unsatisfying quantity of internet site Information or facts about the writer of the MC for the reason of the page.
It is a mildly terrible recognition for a website or writer of the MC, primarily based on considerable popularity research.
The’ Low’ rating applies if a page has one or more of the above characteristics. If a page has a few ‘Low’ quality attributes, a score decrease of ‘Low’ may be suitable.

There’s more going on backstage with Google, similar to all of these high-quality hints.

In a 2017 patent, Google learned how to generate a word model for a set of sites. That model is used to set up a baseline web page pleasant rating to attain those and destiny websites.

Get More Qualified Leads When You Sponsor an SEJ Webinar
Want to get in the front of hardcore marketers and commercial enterprise choice-makers? Showcase your emblem’s information to folks who rely upon it when you sponsor an SEJ ThinkTank webinar.

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Google doesn’t have to inform entrepreneurs that our content material desires paintings. We recognize what we’re doing.

Bad content material happens even to the right marketers – every so often accidentally.

There are valid motives for “bad” excellent content material to exist on your web page, together with:

Email campaigns.
Social calendars.
Sales enablement.
Demand gen campaigns.
Personalized studies.
How to Handle Poor, Underperforming Content
If other teams don’t contact a chunk of content material or use it for six months, you can capture it, flip it around, and make search engine marketing results happen (that could trade how agencies perceive content).

For instance, when you have several pieces of content with identical subject matter that are all unused, you could integrate them into an “Ultimate Guide.”

Think strategically about how the content is placed and ensure it matches the user rationale.

The page also has to be skimmable, engaging, and nicely designed.

Content can feel surprisingly heavy and emotional because there are many reasons no longer to replace your content material.

But if you need to begin this system and have multiple stakeholders, you have to speak with them and be clean with what you’re planning to do.

Doing a content material audit or competitive gap evaluation can help you gather all of the essential details about your content material.

Then, after a while, you can make a records-driven decision about which misplaced or neglected content material opportunities you ought to address on your site and what to exactly do about them.