4 Reasons to Keep Your Website Content Fresh

You’ve put in a lot of time and energy designing and building a website that effectively represents your business in a modern and professional way.

To maximise your website’s effectiveness, this effort needs to continue throughout the website’s existence.

From the get go you’ve ensured your site works properly on all devices, has a stunning design, calls to actions in the right places, offers useful information and has been optimised for search engines.

While these are all important for the cornerstone of your digital presence and online marketing strategy, continuously updating your website with fresh content is an extremely cost-effective and powerful way to get noticed and stay ahead of your competition.

Whether you’re creating blog articles, publishing new pages or expanding old ones, ongoing content marketing efforts can boost an already excellent digital marketing resource.

This does more than just keep your website current. It creates an opportunity to boost your rankings in Google’s organic search results.

No one knows the exact formula, but based on everything we know about Google and the other search engines, maintaining a website with fresh content is a key factor for SEO and achieving high rankings.

Here’s 4 key benefits you can experience when you regularly update your business’s website.

1. The Page Will Be Indexed More Often

Adding content to your website sends a signal to search engines that you have new information that needs to be indexed within their database.

Getting this attention can be done in a variety of ways. Creating a blog is the easiest and most popular method to add fresh content. Other ways include publishing a new page, updating an old outdated page or expanding one that may be short on details.

Google tends to favour pages that have fresh and on-trend content because they’re deemed more up-to-date and relevant.

2. Higher Chance of Ranking for Search Terms

By refreshing your website’s content, you have a better chance of ranking for different search terms.

This doesn’t always mean an update will definitely cause you to rank higher.

However, by adding new content that triggers your website to be indexed, you are creating additional opportunities to show up in search results, which could cause your traffic to increase.

Whilst we are talking about keywords, please remember that with the recent algorithm updates, Google has downgraded the weighting towards ranking on how many keywords your website has. Google continues to prefer top quality content that reads well and offers solutions to a searchers problems, rather than keyword-stuffed poor quality content when it indexes a site.

Do not stuff your website full of keywords - people don’t want to read it and Google will penalise you now.

Refreshing the main pages of your website (core content) is a great tool to achieve this goal as these pages typically hold a lot of value.

3. Shows Readers Your Site Is Up-to-Date

Aside from the benefits to your website’s SEO, sharing fresh, valuable content communicates to your readers that your website, and in turn, your business, is vibrant and kicking.

It has useful information that isn’t old and stale and is a reliable source for answers in their research. If visitors see you as an authoritative, trustworthy resource with informative, valuable content, then they may keep returning to your website for information and will, ideally, come to you if/when they choose to move forward with purchasing your products and/or services.

4. Fresh Content Forces Focus

Businesses evolve, as do the needs of your customers. Being mindful of the need to create fresh content requires you to continually assess what’s occurring in your industry and the direction of your business.

Knowing that fresh content is a priority for the key reasons above, will force you to continue to research, review strategy and request customer feedback on what information is most useful for your client base.

This will not only contribute to your website’s success, but it will also help you focus on your overall business strategy.

Bonus Tip! 5. Write for Your Readers, Not for Google

Considering the advantages of routinely updating content, it can be tempting to make updates for the sole purpose of getting Google and the other search engines’ attention.

Unfortunately, this strategy tends to lead to unnecessary additions or changes that may either go unnoticed or be viewed as black hat or spammy and potentially hurt your rankings in the search results.

Rather, we recommend writing for your audience while keeping best SEO practices in mind.

By focusing on the value of your content, you can earn the reputation of being a reliable resource - for both visitors and search engines. A thoughtful way to do this is to answer questions on your site that you frequently hear from customers.

By introducing popular or trending subjects on your website, you can build authority quickly to help those in the initial stages of their research.

Need a helping hand?

Are you time poor and short resources? Or not sure how to consistently put out engaging, valuable content?

We are a team of digital presence professionals who understand content marketing and its effects on SEO. We are constantly researching the most up-to-date SEO methods across the globe and are dedicated to staying at the forefront of search engines’ latest updates and customising digital marketing strategies based on this knowledge.

Contact us online or give us a call to learn how we can enhance your digital presence, whether your content simply needs refreshing or your website needs to be built from scratch.