Do you have a blog archive with hidden potential? If your company blog has a few years under its belt, the answer is undoubtedly: YES. By growth-hacking your blog archive, you can create organic growth, learn to capture relevant visitors and increase your conversion rate.

Structure - map the entire archive

Start by creating an overview of your entire blog archive. Gather all the urls in a list, for example in Excel or in Google Sheets. Categorize the posts to get an idea of ​​what topics you have available. Do you or don't you have categories? Spend some time dividing your posts into topics, categories and get an idea of ​​what you have in your archive. Also create a column for "type of post", such as customer cases, employee stories or regular blog posts.

In your survey, you should also include who the target group for each post is, i.e. which buyer persona may be interested in this particular content. Check if it is an informative post, an in-depth or comparative post or a post that is intended for someone who is ready to buy.

Learn more about content during the buyer's journey

Now that you have a clearer picture of what you have in the archive, it is time to decide what you actually want. The content that you have on your corporate blog should support the business. When talking about blog posts, it is easy to think of inspiration and nice buzzwords, but it is not certain that this is what you should focus on right now. Ask yourself questions like:

• - Who will benefit from this content on the blog?
• - What topics are relevant to our business?
• - What do our potential customers want to know?
• - What common questions do we need to answer or bring up?
• - Which keywords and search phrases are important for us to appear on?

A common mistake is to focus too much on the awareness phase, or that the content is too much trying to sell. A good rule of thumb is that the content of each post should match the visitor's search intent on Google - which also usually matches well with what the person in the LinkedIn feed expects to see when you share the post there with the same headline.

What is good? Invest in overdelivery

Once you have a clear overview of everything, start evaluating your blog archive! Learn that Google Analytics is your best friend, but social media analytics tools can also be great to have. You will pretty quickly see which posts stand out in the statistics. But even if they rank well, still ask yourself the question - how can I make them even better? For example, you can always add more content, update the text with newer and more relevant information, and change images.

Also keep in mind: Posts that go well and viral go well and viral for a reason. Therefore, it is important that you start to look at two things:

• - How can you best recycle your content?
• - What more angles can you do with the same topic?

What can be good? Find potential

Step two is to read through all your posts. And yes, it is time consuming. But on the other hand, it is a one-time effort. When you are done, you will have a completely different overview and future optimization will go much faster. Evaluate which texts have a relevant basis. Is it possible to match them with a keyword or a search phrase that many are searching for? Is it possible to re-angle and develop the text so that it feels like new with small edits? Write down all the measures required for each text, for example if they are to be optimized, expanded, or completely rewritten.

Take the opportunity to think about how you can reuse your new-old posts. Keep in mind which pieces from the posts can be broken out and repackaged for social media use, for example.

What does not hold? Slaughter your weaknesses

There is no need to keep texts that don't work. There is no point in sticking to a specific content that doesn’t create value. You need to dare to clear out the posts that don't hold the requested standard. The topics may be relevant, but sometimes the best option is to write a completely new text. Just remember to create redirect links to relevant pages when removing posts from your blog.

Update links and call to actions

Of course, when you go through all of the available content, you should also take the opportunity to update your blog posts with good links. Make sure that your call to actions are well placed to optimize the possibility of conversion. Also remember to work smart with your internal linking so that you will support your most important pages with linking power to maximize the SEO.

What is missing? Do a gap analysis

Once you have finished your content analysis and optimization, you will have it clear what is missing. Make a list of the keywords you have not optimized for or that are completely missing, but which you want to appear on. Think about which steps in the target group's buying journey you need to cover with guiding and relevant content. Do you need more educational or informative posts? A well done, thorough review of the blog archive will help you discover the pieces of the puzzle your content strategy needs or at the moment is missing.

Your new content strategy

Finally, it's time to update your content plan. With the help of qualitative insights from your blog archive, traffic figures, social statistics and search behavior data, you will have a good foundation for your new data-driven content strategy. You can also fill your content calendar for a long time to come - you have just recycled an entire annual production with some kick-ass content and freshly optimized ideas!