4 Benefits of Republishing your Law Firm’s Blog Posts

Consider how much information comes at you in one day. From social media, to RSS Feeds you subscribe to, to email and things that get sent to you throughout the day. It’s easy to research one topic and quickly go down a rabbit hole until you realize you’ve spent an hour reading about something totally unrelated to your original inquiry! That’s because content is critical in today’s world, and smart companies and firms are publishing it like crazy. The downside of that? It’s easy to miss content when it’s only published once. That’s where republishing comes in. It’s important for your firm – and for your followers and prospects.

If you haven’t been republishing your firm’s content, you should try doing so – here’s why:

1. Your advice is still accurate and helpful. Say you published a blog post last year on how to protect a corporate patent. It’s a guarantee that there are still people out there struggling with that issue. In fact, maybe at the time you published the blog, there was someone who needed to read that but missed it (due to the information overload just described above). As long as the information you have to share is still timely and relevant, publish it again!
2. Republishing helps you to update and refresh your content catalog. Think about how long you’ve been creating content. Chances are, your catalog of content goes back quite a while. You can still get traffic on some of those posts if you update them appropriately. Going through this process is also a good exercise in tidying up your catalog. Remove posts that are no longer relevant, update those that are, and move some back into the rotation to drive new traffic.
3. Maintain or even improve your search rankings. If you have a post that was ranking well for particular words or phrases, don’t let that SEO power decline as the content becomes dated. Update the piece and be sure to add new keywords that you’ve discovered through recent research. You can even create a new version and then direct the old version to the new one.
4. Save time and fill your editorial calendar. Any marketer knows that time is a valuable commodity in a law firm. When you’re approaching a particularly busy time, you can save yourself some trouble by scheduling a new publish of some past posts. This is a really helpful practice during known stressful cycles, or when your team will be out of town or occupied with conferences or events.

One note on best practices: if your url includes the publication date (or even month or year), it’s best to republish so it’s current. You’d probably have hesitations following advice in an article dated 2016 – and so will your readers. It makes the most sense to give articles new URLs that will reflect the current date.

Takeaway

There are a lot of other best practices we’d love to share on this topic. Be sure to check our blog for the follow up on a detailed how-to for republishing. In the meantime, if you have any questions about when, why, or how to republish blog posts – saving your team time and effort to apply elsewhere – let us know!