How to rewrite and republish content with Yoast Duplicate Post

We all want to write the best possible content on our favorite topic. As writers, we also know that that not always happens on the first try. While you do need to deliver quality on that first try, it doesn’t hurt to dive back into published articles to updated and improve them wherever you can. We have a helpful tool that makes the process of rewriting and republishing content a lot easier on WordPress.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

The importance of content maintenance

You’ll often hear us urging you to publish only high quality content, but we understand that’s not always a given. There are dozens of reasons why you’d want to improve your existing content. Maybe your heart wasn’t really in it when you sat down to write. Or maybe you lost focus during the writing process and ended up with something a bit off the mark. Many writers struggle to find the right moment to write and end up hitting the deadline, rushing things to get it published. Or maybe you became a better writer over time! Whatever the reason, if an article is important, but doesn’t give you — or your readers — enough joy, you can edit it or rewrite it.

Of course, it doesn’t always have to concern your writing skills. There are many outside factors that might force you to update your content. Your product might have changed, you have new competitors, your audience has changed or Google launched new rich results that might prove a fresh source of traffic. Also, outdated content isn’t very trustworthy for readers so it’s a good idea to fix what you can.

There’s also the case of evergreen content. When you have a lot of evergreen content — articles you see as the cornerstones of your site — you want to make sure these stay in perfect condition. Your cornerstone content should always be awesome, so you should work on it regularly. Updating and rewriting such a piece of content can be quite an undertaking but it is a necessary one. At Yoast, we try to redo our Ultimate Guides at least twice a year but in your niche, developments might go so fast that you have to keep up with it on a regular basis.

Rewriting content the easy way

Once you’ve found a post in desperate need of an update or rewrite, you need to start planning your update. Read the post and try to determine how much time it would cost to update. Need to redo a couple of sentences? No problem, you can fit that in when you have time. Rewrite a large part of it? Or need to redo some research? That would take longer and so you need to plan ahead.

Once you have everything you need to rewrite that article, the real work starts. Start going over the article and read every sentence critically. Can you improve it? Do you need more examples in the text or new stats? Make sure that everything is easy to read and structured properly. Add a table of contents to improve scannability. The various analyses in Yoast SEO can help you to improve your writing for both search engines as well as humans.

We also have another big help for you, but chances are you haven’t discovered this yet — meet Yoast Duplicate Post!

How to use Rewrite & Republish in Yoast Duplicate Post

Rewriting content has always been quite a struggle in WordPress. You were always bound to the way WordPress is built: you can have one version of a post or page. Once you’ve published a post you can’t simply update it without your changes appearing on the front-end whenever you save your post.

Of course, several plugins solved this problem by letting you duplicate or clone a post with one click. This made it possible to do big content updates in silence as you are working in a new draft. When you are done, simply copy and paste the new text over the original post content and publish. One of those invaluable plugins is Yoast Duplicate Post. But Yoast Duplicate Post comes with something unique: Rewrite & Republish. This makes updating articles a seamless process!

Rewriting content in WordPress became a lot easier

While the task of rewriting content still is hard, the technical work around that has just become much easier. The Yoast Duplicate Post plugin now has a feature called Rewrite & Republish that makes it really a one-two-three step process. At Yoast, this has saved us a whole lot of time and frustration. That Reschedule feature alone… *chef’s kiss*! We hope you like it too!