What's more valuable: new content or optimizing old content

[RicardoSalcedo]

We are a niche legacy print publication that's been around for close to 20 years. Recently, we combined several old sites in one new responsive site. We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed. Most of the old pieces although published, have not been optimized for SEO. However, as we create new pieces, we optimize them for search and social and they tend to get more organic traffic.

Where we're torn is on how much we should balance our limited editorial resources between cleaning up and optimizing our extensive archive to improve our organic reach, vs. pumping out new original pieces each week.

I realize that without a lot of data the answers will be varied - I guess I'm looking for a best practices approach for content publishers.

If it helps at all, our main conversion goal is selling subscriptions to our print and digital publications. We know that organic traffic tends to be more engaged than our social referrals. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the magazine fulfilment business, it's tough to know which channels convert better.

Thanks!

[EGOL]

We have over 7,000 articles -many of which are evergreen and can be repurposed when needed.

salivatin'

If these are unique, evergreen articles, I would be attacking that as fast as possible.  I would divert staff with appropriate talent away from other jobs.   They would clean these up, any that are evergreen and could be displayed as content unseen by current readers would be republished and displayed in my normal content stream.   All others would be built into the category and internal linkage format of the website.  The faster you get them up the faster then will be pulling in traffic.   I would do them slowly enough to do a great job but otherwise as quickly as possible.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hey there

Moz actually has a great step by step guide to help you with deciding what content can be updated, removed, or consolidated. You can read more about that here.

It covers everything from traffic, relevancy, shares, linking and categorization and more. Super comprehensive.

Hope this helps! Good luck!