SEO
The Complete Guide to Content Repurposing
Your content is not “one and done” when published.
You’ve spent so much time creating that piece of content. So it makes sense to get as much mileage as you can out of each piece you create.
How do you do that? Content repurposing.
In this post, you’ll learn the following:
Content repurposing is when you find a new use for all or parts of your existing content. It usually involves changing up the format of the content, e.g., from a video to a blog post.
Here are three reasons why you should repurpose your content:
1. It’s efficient
You don’t always have to create every piece of content from scratch. Not only is it time-consuming, but it also makes it difficult to scale up your content creation.
Instead, take advantage of what you’ve already created. You’ve put in the hard work to create that piece of content, so make full use of it.
Remix and reformat it for different channels.
2. It allows you to reach audiences who prefer different formats
We all have different tastes.
There are some people who prefer reading. Others prefer watching, while the rest prefer listening.
Converting your content into different formats allows you to reach these different sets of audiences.
3. It gives your existing content a new lease of life
In 2017, we published this post on how long it takes to rank on Google. Two years later, we turned it into a Twitter thread:
If you’re doing client SEO, new clients will likely ask you this question:
“How long till my website/page ranks on top of Google?“
The standard response: it depends.
But is there a better answer?
We did a study in 2017 to find out.
A thread 👇
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) October 1, 2019
We didn’t rerun the study. Neither did we update nor refresh the content. Nothing was changed. But it regained new life when it was turned into a Twitter thread.
Content discovery is a perpetual problem. If your posts are not ranking on Google, the chances of them being “rediscovered” are low. But they’re probably still good pieces of content. They’re just under-discovered.
So when you turn your content into new formats on other platforms, you help other people rediscover your older content.
There is no “one piece of content” you must repurpose. It eventually depends on your goals and strategy.
However, content repurposing does require some work. It’s not a one-to-one conversion—you have to expect to do some rewriting or editing so that the content fits the new format and platform.
Expert “repurposers” like GaryVee have a team behind them. They’re not going about it alone. That also means that if you are doing it alone, you will not be able to repurpose every single piece of content.
Translation: You need to prioritize.
A good way to do this is to look at what the platform wants and repurpose content specifically for it. For example, suppose you want to repurpose one of your blog posts into a YouTube video.
Rather than choosing at will, find out what topics people are searching for on YouTube. Then find the best-fit blog post for that topic and repurpose it accordingly. We’ll go into more detail on how to do so shortly.
Alternatively, you can simply find your best-performing pieces and repurpose them. After all, if they’re doing well on one channel, there is a higher probability they’ll also do well on another.
This can be as simple as seeing which of your videos on YouTube have the most views:
You can also enter your website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Top pages report to see which of your pages get the most search traffic:
Content repurposing ideas
Ready to repurpose your content? Here are a few ideas you can consider:
1. Turn your blog post into a video (and vice versa)
We often do this at Ahrefs. For example, our blog post on influencer marketing was repurposed into a video.
This is bidirectional. We also turn our videos into blog posts. For example, this blog post on affiliate marketing was created using content in our video.
As mentioned earlier, this is not done randomly. To figure out which content we should repurpose, we first find out which topics people are searching for. Here’s how we do it for YouTube:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Select YouTube
- Enter a few relevant keywords (e.g., SEO, marketing, etc)
- Go to the Matching terms report
Eyeball the report and see if there are any topics that match an existing blog post you have. For example, we can see that the term “influencer marketing” gets around 1,500 monthly searches on YouTube—exactly the reason why we repurposed the blog post into a video.
If you’re doing it the other way around—turning a video into a blog post—then follow the same steps but switch the search engine to Google.
Likewise, look through the report and see if there are any topics that match an existing video.
2. Repurpose your videos into a course
Most of your content is probably published chronologically. But chronology is not a great way to consume content.
So why not organize pieces of content in a logical manner and turn them into a course?
For example, our SEO training course is a series of YouTube videos neatly arranged into multiple modules.
Likewise, our “how to use Ahrefs” course is made up of in-app tutorials that already exist within our reports.
How do you know what courses to create? Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter a few relevant keywords (e.g., SEO, marketing, etc)
- Go to the Matching terms report
- In the Include box, enter terms like “course,” “academy,” “training,” etc
- Choose Any word
Look through the report and see if there are any courses you can create by repurposing your content.
3. Turn your blog posts into a book
What’s the written version of a course? A book!
Likewise, you can compile and organize your blog posts and turn them into a book. This can live on your site simply as an ebook. Or you can even go big and publish it as an actual paperback.
This is what CoSchedule did.
The issue, however, is that book discovery has not kept up with the times. So even after repurposing, you’ll need to promote your book.
One way to do this is to find sites that collate lists of the best books in your niche and get your book mentioned.
Here’s how to find these sites:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for “best [topic] books”
- Set the Live/Broken filter to Live only (you want to be included, so the page needs to be live)
- Check One page per domain (you don’t need to reach out to the same site more than once)
- Sort the results by Page traffic to prioritize your efforts
Go through the list and see if your book is a good fit for any of these pages.
4. Turn your videos into multiple short-form videos
With the popularity of TikTok, short-form videos are a rising format. Even YouTube is getting in on the game with #shorts.
If you have an existing video, it makes perfect sense to divide and turn it into multiple shorter videos. You can then republish them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram Reels, or even as YouTube shorts or TikTok videos.
For example, this 1 ½ minute video on Twitter was originally part of a longer YouTube video we published.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7PzHO40bOU
5. Turn your blog posts into guest posts
We spend quite a bit of time researching each blog post. Some posts are so comprehensive that they span a few chapters:
Each chapter can easily be a blog post on its own.
So here’s the idea: Why not turn each of these chapters into a guest post for other sites? Not only is it efficient—you’ve done the research after all—but you also get additional exposure, referral traffic and, better, a link back to your own site. (And links are an important ranking factor for ranking higher on Google.)
We call this concept the “Splintering Technique”:
- Write an incredible, detailed piece of content for your blog
- Break it into “splinters” and submit each one as a guest article to another blog
You can even go further by changing the perspective for each topic. For example, Chapter 2 on “how to build links” can easily be transformed into multiple blog posts:
- How to build links for startups
- How to build links for nonprofits
- How to build links for ecommerce businesses
- How to build links for local businesses
And so on.
We term this the “Perspective Technique”:
This concept is not “new.” It’s used extensively in the world of book publishing. See, for example, the books written by business guru Eliyahu Goldratt:
It’s basically Eliyahu’s famous Theory of Constraints model applied to different perspectives.
With a bunch of content you can “splinter” off, how do you find sites you can pitch to? Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for terms relevant to your niche (e.g., keto)
Then, set these filters:
- Check One page per domain
- Check Exclude subdomains
- Check Exclude homepages
- Set Live/Broken filter to Only live
- Language filter to English (or language you write in)
If the list is still too large to manage, you can set more filters (e.g., Domain Rating) to narrow it down to the best sites.
Since these sites cover topics similar to yours, they’re likely to accept your guest post pitch. Find the website owner’s or editor’s email, reach out, and pitch them your topics.
Recommended reading: Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-Quality Links at Scale
6. Turn your blog post into Twitter threads
Every time we publish a post, we encourage each individual author to repurpose their content into a Twitter thread.
If you’re trying to solve keyword cannibalization, you might be cutting off your nose to spite your face. 🔪👃😱
Here’s why.
//THREAD//
— Joshua Hardwick (@JoshuaCHardwick) December 8, 2021
Google claims that it uses title tags ~87% of the time after the most recent updates.
Well, we analyzed 953,276 pages and got a much lower 66.6% match rate 😈
A few more highlights from our latest @ahrefs data study 👇 pic.twitter.com/JHn1PkevTm
— Michal Pecánek (@michalpecanek) November 16, 2021
As you can see, they get a ton of traction.
You can turn the entire blog post or parts of it into a thread. For example, this thread is from a section of our blog post on technical SEO:
One of the hardest things for SEOs is prioritization. There are a lot of best practices, but some changes will have more of an impact on your rankings and traffic than others.
Here are some technical SEO quick wins 🧵
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) September 13, 2021
Don’t limit yourself to blog posts. Videos, podcasts, etc.,—they’re all Twitter thread-worthy material.
Ahrefs just crossed $100M ARR being bootstrapped — I talked to their CMO for 1 hour — here are the 13 reasons for their success (#10 surprised me)
— Guillaume Moubeche (@GuillaumeMbh) January 25, 2022
How do you write a great thread? Let’s get meta and learn from creators on Twitter themselves:
Twitter threads are the new blogs.
Over the last 5 weeks, I’ve 32x my Twitter following posting a thread a day.
These 15 learnings will help your threads go viral 🧵
— Alex Garcia 🔍 (@alexgarcia_atx) May 6, 2021
7. Turn blog posts/videos/existing content into Quora answers
A few years ago, I started actively answering questions on Quora. In the process, I’ve gained over a million views.
But most of my answers were not generated from scratch. Instead, I repurposed them from our existing content.
How do you find the right questions to answer? Here’s how:
- Enter quora.com into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Go to the Top pages report
- In the Include box, enter topics relevant to your content
You’ll see a list of questions that are actually ranking on Google. So by answering these questions, you can get traffic from both Google and Quora.
Pick out those that you can repurpose content for and answer them.
Recommended reading: Quora Marketing: ~1 Million Views Generated. Here’s How to Replicate Our Success
8. Turn your content into Reddit posts
Marketers tend to skip out on Reddit because of the community’s intense hatred for anything promotional. But Reddit is still a social network—and social networks need content to thrive.
That means marketers are welcome, as long as the content they post is helpful and valuable.
One way to do this is to publish a tl;dr version of your content and strip away all internal and external links. Only at the end of your post do you leave a link back to your original piece of content.
That’s what our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, recently did on the r/bigseo subreddit.
With 74 upvotes and a Silver award, it was pretty well received.
Recommended reading: Reddit Marketing: How to Self Promote on Reddit and Get More Traffic
9. Reuse bits and pieces of your existing content as social media posts
At Ahrefs, we like to create custom images that illustrate certain concepts in our content. Not surprisingly, we also repurpose them on our social media accounts:
Content can become outdated. When that happens, you’ll have to update your content.
Do you update everything? No, especially if you have hundreds of blog posts like us. Instead, you’ll have to prioritize. Do that by following this flowchart 👇 pic.twitter.com/g7yejRgKOg
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) January 10, 2022
Go through your content. Each tip, idea, solution, lesson, custom image, or takeaway in your content can be extracted and reused as a standalone post on social media.
Don’t waste it.
Final thoughts
Most people repurpose their content after it has been published. But content repurposing, like content promotion, has to be baked into the creation process.
For content promotion, that means thinking about how you want to promote your content before you begin creating it. Likewise, for content repurposing, you have to think about how you want to repurpose your content before you create it.
Then, while you’re creating the content, you’re also repurposing it at the same time. That way, it’s not a mad dash after publication. Rather, your repurposed content can be launched together with your published content—and help distribute it further.
Ryan McCready, head of content marketing at Foundation Inc., calls this “active repurposing.” I recommend reading this post to see how he puts it into action.
Any questions or comments about content repurposing? Let me know on Twitter.
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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